"You don't need 250k to 300k, and if you had it you'd wish you had 500k or 750k anyway."

Spending a quarter mill on a prototype seems like a horrible decision, TBH...

For a mental health app, it does seem a bit on the pricy side, although if you're sourcing content from accredited professionals things do get expensive fast. You have to make good decisions about what's critical and what can wait until v2.

"although if you're sourcing content from accredited professionals things do get expensive fast."

Well, if you're spending significant resources upfront on content from accredited professionals for a mental health app...you're probably doing it wrong.

The problem in the mental health space isn't the lack of information, or access to information...

I guess it depends on the business, in IT and Tech a quarter mill is a lot, in Biotech am its pocket change.

In every other industry you have to invest money upfront so you actually have a product to sell, and as the software industry matures the table stakes will continue to rise. People are only willing to use half-baked prototypes when they have no choice, but in more and more domains customers will have choice and expectations go up as a result

But what is and isn't "half-baked prototype"? People/users/media/investors confuse GUI with functionality with "addresses actual use case(s) for users who might pay/subscribe".

I'd rather have something with a brutal/nonexistent GUI but provides useful functionality and gives me a warm fuzzy that the developers have some use cases in mind, or a suggested workflow.

Yes there is a first-mover advantage to getting into a domain early.

"People are only willing to use half-baked prototypes when they have no choice, but in more and more domains customers will have choice and expectations go up as a result"

But how long are they actually using the half baked prototype?

I thought the purpose of the half baked prototype was to validate the idea, get good user feedback and get as much information as possible before dedicating resources and making more permanent design/architecture choices.

If you are spending massive time and resources before this is achieved, you are doing it wrong IMO...

Do things that don't scale is really an absolute truth.

If you can use Excel spreadsheet or Google form to build your product. Do it for your first 100 users.

Obviously if you're in deep tech then this doesn't apply. But with deep tech and moonshots the value isn't the product, it's your arbitrage opportunity and expert patentable knowledge.

"If you can use Excel spreadsheet or Google form to build your product. Do it for your first 100 users." I did, what's next?

You need to have a MVP in the target market. You need to demonstrate that it can scale. Therefore, if your business model works for 100 customers on the web, it does not necessarily mean that it will be successful on a larger scale on mobile.

> The idea that you have to buy that is nonsense.

Time === money.

If you're doing it, or someone else is doing it. You're paying.

I think you have to realize that time doesn’t equal money.

You can sometimes choose to sell time for money or use money to buy time, but not always. If nobody’s willing to exchange their money for your time then your time doesn’t equal money.

Nothing is free.

Opportunity costs are real.

So if you're executing the mundane and the outsource-able, while the heavy lifting sits idle...that's foolish. It's the road to ruin.

Time is money.

> A longer runway puts off the scary point where you have to launch something.

Amen. It's such a common problem. And one I totally get. The first possible MVP is so far from a founder's vision that it's very easy to say, "Well, let's just add X". And then repeat and repeat and repeat.

More than a decade ago I was the technical cofounder for a former colleague. He had an idea that was really compelling at the time, one for whom the key engine of growth would be Facebook sharing. He quickly raised $1.2m from some name-brand VCs as a seed. We both had strong backgrounds in user testing, so we looked vigorously for ways to find out if our approach made sense to users.

He hit upon the idea of getting people off Craigslist under the guise of market research. Before we had built anything, he'd bring people in and have them try out a few different sites and give opinions. One of them was Facebook, which they'd log into using their own account. But what they didn't know until after was that we used Greasemonkey to generate fake newsfeed entries supposedly from their real friends.

One of our key assumptions was around viral growth, so we wanted them to react positively and possibly try to sign up for our site. What actually happened is that most people hated it. We tried a bunch of variations and they still mostly hated it. So we went to our first board meeting on Sand Hill Road and told them that the thing we all thought brilliant 6 weeks before was actually a bad idea and we had data to prove it. They were... nonplussed. Happily by then we had our next idea ready to pitch so they didn't murder us or anything, but I did worry.

The thing that we didn't learn until later was that two other companies had pitched and gotten funded for basically the same idea at about the same time. Between them they raised something like $12 million. And I forget the details now, but each of them persisted for something like 12-18 months longer than we did before they gave up.

I'm convinced that raising less made us more aggressive in our testing and more willing to pivot. And even if it didn't, I still take pride in wasting way less money on dry holes.