In your story you thought you knew what to build, but didn't.
The "MVP" theory is that the MVP is part of validating that you really know what to build, as you say.
OP author disagrees. (I'm not sure OP author says anything about when you "start selling" exactly).
Clearly a lot more can be said about how you know what to build if not an "MVP" approach. OP suggests a few things: "cultivated instinct" (which as a phrase alone isn't too useful, how do you get it?); Spending a lot of time talking to potential customers, and not necessarily taking what they say at face value but "averaging" it, and mixing with that "cultivated instinct"; and maybe most specifically/operationalizable -- spend some time working in the industry/market before starting the company at all, so you've seen "how 5 other companies have built something and know all the things that they’ve done wrong, and it will be a lot easier."
"Domain expertise" might be the main thing he's talking about, arguing agianst the idea that you can start a company without somebody involved having significant domain expertise/experience in the industry, but instead develop that market knowledge as you go, through an "MVP" approach.
I'm curious how those ideas relate to your company, how much industry/domain experience you had before starting the company.
>> "Domain expertise" might be the main thing he's talking about
This is clearly what he is talking about. When he is talking about his experience with the "Senior Design project course in Computer Science at my alma mater" he is really talking about how people can "MVP their way into getting domain expertise" at some level. This is a fundamental problem with the "startup industry".
Groups of people from a computing (I want to be broader than CS) that have reasonably strong technical skills and a lot of enthusiasm for applying those skills want to build successful startups. They generally lack domain expertise outside of technology-adjacent products for the most part. It's not completely absent because there is some success, but there isn't a balance for the most part.
Where does the domain expertise come from then? It could come from a slow development process involving the founders immersing themselves in the area. That's really only something that's going to be feasible before the founders create the company. Once the company has been founded, it becomes a scramble to interpret some ideas and build an MVP that can be sold to some of the advisors that the founders could get time with. It's only now that the foundational work is happening. If the right people see the MVP, or the founders make the right connections, it's possible to catapult forward from here, but it's a predictable failure point.
The "MVP" theory is that the MVP is part of validating that you really know what to build, as you say.
OP author disagrees. (I'm not sure OP author says anything about when you "start selling" exactly).
Clearly a lot more can be said about how you know what to build if not an "MVP" approach. OP suggests a few things: "cultivated instinct" (which as a phrase alone isn't too useful, how do you get it?); Spending a lot of time talking to potential customers, and not necessarily taking what they say at face value but "averaging" it, and mixing with that "cultivated instinct"; and maybe most specifically/operationalizable -- spend some time working in the industry/market before starting the company at all, so you've seen "how 5 other companies have built something and know all the things that they’ve done wrong, and it will be a lot easier."
"Domain expertise" might be the main thing he's talking about, arguing agianst the idea that you can start a company without somebody involved having significant domain expertise/experience in the industry, but instead develop that market knowledge as you go, through an "MVP" approach.
I'm curious how those ideas relate to your company, how much industry/domain experience you had before starting the company.