There are no subpar products that people love. First of all, "quality" is relative. See chatgpt, it's wrong half the time, in a decade if someone were to release a chatbot of chat gpt quality we would say it's terrible. But today, it's the best we have.

The classic story is how airbnb and stripe launched without coding anything, everything was done manually.

Now launch an airbnb competitor today using the same strategy. Obviously comparing yourself to airbnb is dumb, because back then all software was terrible.

The actually successful modern companies of the past few years are openai, tiktok and figma. They all launched with complete products and are massively successful. That's what it takes today.

> I have seen companies die trying to perfect software no one is buying though, quite often.

Most companies die.

Until a product hits a minimum quality threshold, its useless. Which is basically what you stated later. Now most areas are mature enough that a copy pasted solution hits that minimum threshold (Eg, setting up a basic ecommerce site with ordering and payment). But for uncharted territory, that threshold is very real, hit it or die.

But my intuition is that failing to find product market fit (for whatever reason) kills companies earlier, whereas hitting product market fit with a subpar engineering foundation is more likely to slow companies down in later stages where they die more slowly or just underachieve.

I think Twitter is probably the best known example of that second pattern. It may be apocryphal that this was their problem, but either way, I think this is a real phenomenon in general.