I would also disagree. I've almost finished v1 (literally, a bare bones MVP) of my SaaS idea, and my God, it took so much more time than I expected. And I'm a veteran developer who's shipped tens of projects.

The thing is, there's a lot more that goes into a viable product than just the core features.

> The thing is, there's a lot more that goes into a viable product than just the core features.

Yes, yes, YES! I'm doing this now, and just figuring out the "business" side of the product code is so much more work than the core idea (which is simple to code).

And getting the actual sales/marketing/accounting/admin/etc stuff is going to be 10x worse, I am sure.

Completely agree! For my start-up, beyond the core features, there's been a versioning system, front-end framework, database set-up, server maintenance, keeping up with patches to your coding language, fine-tuning CSS, analytics packages, user feedback tools, and that's just the list that I came up with in 10 seconds. In reality, there's actually much more.

>> The thing is, there's a lot more that goes into a viable product than just the core features.

This! I agree wholeheartedly, a useful tool/hack must travel a long road before it can become a product. Even if it's essentially solving the same problem.