The toughest part of this is finding a product that people are willing to pay for. The sunk cost fallacy kicks in, and everyone doubles down on pushing the product and iterating until they finally have no choice but to admit failure. I think YC does a great job of getting people to ask what is the absolute least amount of work I can do to validate an idea. Can you send texts instead of build an app? Can you do it all manually for the first 5 customers? Be quick to throw away things that aren't working, you don't have the bandwidth as a solo founder to make a perfect product, you NEED to see market acceptance to make it worth your time.
>getting people to ask what is the absolute least amount of work I can do to validate an idea
This is even a problem in the sciences! Everyone wants to kick the can (getting feedback on their pet hypothesis from reality) down the road & play with their shiny, awesome tech/math in the meantime.
"The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." Thomas Huxley
100% disagree.
People good at this “know it when they see it” on the “finding a product that people are willing to pay for”. They don’t find this part hard.
What is hard is keeping mistakes/ignorance marginally less fatal than the ground you gain in your successes... forever.
