The trendy answer is that you need to find what’s called “product-market fit,” which is a fancy way of saying that you need to build a thing people are willing to pay for. It turns out that’s pretty hard, because you don’t know what people will pay for until you ask them to, and if what you’re building is truly novel, there’s no history for you to go on. Fortunately, the iteration cycle in a software business is fast (we don’t need to retool milling machines here), and from some approximately correct starting point we can converge on a final product, almost like successive guesses at the
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