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> You have a good point but software that exists with no one to sell it is more valuable than salesman with nothing to sell.

Never seen that happen. Software that exists with no one to sell it just doesn't get sold.

On the other hand, a salesman with nothing to sell is Bill Gates when he signed on to provide MS DOS for IBM.

In fact, if you look over the history of this industry, success has, with few exceptions, always been sales-first, then development effort.

It's why we prioritise MVP: do the minimum necessary that we can sell, so that the dev effort is not wasted. At it's core, MVP would involve absolutely no development at all.




Is this just a difference of perspective? Seems like GP's point was that software has latent value, and differentiation, and the act of selling is commodifiable.

Your point, correct me if I'm wrong, is that software is more the commodity and sales is differentiable?

I wonder how this stacks up against other software that yielded massive public utility, like UNIX, or the internet.


> Your point, correct me if I'm wrong, is that software is more the commodity and sales is differentiable?

At this point in time ... well, yes.

Just about any software that a business needs is, at this point in time, already written, with few exceptions.

For almost any MVP, at this point in time, you can gauge market interest using something that already exists.

> I wonder how this stacks up against other software that yielded massive public utility, like UNIX, or the internet.

Those were different times, and even those different times things like UNIX were mostly differentiated only by sales-efforts of the hardware vendors.

There was a time when people had to be sold on the idea of the internet being at all useful. It had to be sold.




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