We like building things, and making them fast and powerful and efficient.
The customer doesn't care about any of that though. They just want something that helps them.
What happens is that most of the time making something fast, powerful and efficient implies so much resources that the ambitious engineer can not complete the project in time.
Customers prefer something that works today, even with limited functionality that something perfect that only works inside the mind of the engineer.
That is the reason Steve Jobs said no so many times, because this way his company could ship products in time.
That in engineers mindset problem: It is painful to say No, like the song says, we "want it all".
Only if the thing being fast, powerful and efficient actually solves their problem better.
Is that really the most common problem? I would probably be one of those engineers (if I'd start a business) and I'm a lot more afraid to sell something that doesn't exist yet than the other way around. Because now in addition to your usual problems you have legal obligations to deliver a product. I think this is one of the reasons for the crazy crunch culture of many startups.
Instead of selling a fake MVP product it is probably more healthy to be upfront to customers and let them pay for your development time like a consultant... And then repeat the work faster for different customers until you can spin the process out into a actual product.
In the case of the startups you describe I always imagine they have great sales and marketing people but no actual product, and thus survive only until the VC money dries up...
> Instead of selling a fake MVP product it is probably more healthy to be upfront to customers and let them pay for your development time like a consultant
Careful, no one is advocating selling "fake" products. The key is to develop a minimal product that can be sold. It has to work, though. Fraud will sink a startup very quickly.
From there, you can contract with additional customers to expand the product to meet their needs. This is more difficult than it sounds, though, as you'll quickly be torn between working on what's best for the product as a whole, and what's best for an individual customer's unique needs.
I've seen many startups go down this path with best intentions, but ultimately become contracting shops with a single customer. That's fine if that's your goal, but it's painful when the contracts dry up and you don't have a product that appeals to the mass market.
The most common problem, if you're a really talented engineer, is that you could work for a big company and be paid more in a single year than your business will bring in for its entire lifetime.
Conversely what you really find is, the people running 20+ person companies with tens of millions in investor money to bring in only $1m in revenue a year - they lacked the talent, actually, to just make the money at a big company. That you should start with the assumption that capitalism works, and that the person doing this thing is not stupid but just shut out from a better opportunity.
So maybe you're a really talented engineer but you are foreign so you'd need an H1-B to work for Google. Or maybe you're a former product manager from Microsoft who didn't quit, but was laid off, so you really can't just go and make the money.
A transplant surgeon brings in about $1m in revenue per day for heart transplants. There is no risk there, there is unlimited demand for heart transplants. It's just extremely hard to become a transplant surgeon, it is extremely competitive, much more competitive than making a website. While I'm not suggesting every startup CEO is just a washed-out up-and-coming surgeon, there is other stuff they may have washed out from broadly, like just medicine itself, that led them to chase the worse economics of where they are.
I have met some people who implicitly or even explicitly claimed they were above being an employee but I think they weren’t being honest about their actual employment prospects.
BTW, raising tens of millions for one million in revenue doesn't happen that often.
Odds are you'd make more money taking a job at BigCo, live like you only needed half what you're making, and invest that extra money into the public market. This isn't as fun though.
Do they not then own at least a share of the IP? You'd be lucky to find a customer that takes you on as a consultant but lets you keep the IP you develop during that time.
? Not trying to be argumentative but that doesn't seem ironic to me at all. I would expect the most ambitious engineers to think that simply building the thing would be enough.
If you need to build for years to release something [1], it's less likely that you're addressing a real need. The best products can start dead simple, even ugly, but still solve the problem.
[1] Deep tech is the obvious exception here.
Asking for sales up front means you have to face that right away. It's better for the business but harder for the founder.
Great point. The long-term survival of a business distills down to being able to bring in more money than it costs you to produce a product. It's such a simple concept, but it's easy to forget when you're swept up in the excitement of coding and engineering an idea you're excited about.
Ironically, it's the most ambitious engineers who tend to make the mistake of doing too much engineering work before trying to validate the product. I can't count how many times I've signed up to follow ambitious engineers' startup ventures that turn into years of highly-detailed marketing updates for products that never seem to get any closer to materializing. These are the startups that fizzle out 2-3 years later with blog posts blaming the industry, the timing, the economy, or other external factors for their failure.
In reality, most of them could have determined their market fit, or lack thereof, much faster by launching a smaller version early and iterating with customer feedback.