> If you start out knowing that you are writing something that will be trashed, why would you invest yourself in it?
This basically boils down to: why would you make a high-risk bet? The answer: Because they sometimes pay off big.
I like building things to last. But building something to last when odds of success are 50 to 1 against is foolish. If you are trying to test a startup idea, the only sensible approach is to bet the absolute smallest amount necessary to find out if the idea is worthwhile.
I've built great systems for ideas that didn't work, and it sucks. For example, in 2004 I put together a team and spent 9 months building an awesome implementation of an excellent idea that was just 5 years too early. We were all really proud of our technical work, but since we ended up with a trivial number of users, it was all, in the end, wasted effort.
Later I realized, thanks to people like Eric Ries, that the thing to do early on was to invest just enough to see if there was something to the idea. Most things won't, which means you save enough time to rebuild the few that do properly.
The "think through your ideas" thing is a false hope. You can only think so much about limited data. People can be just as happy working on something they're planning to throw away. Artists often do plenty of sketches before they do the real one, and software developers can do the same.
This basically boils down to: why would you make a high-risk bet? The answer: Because they sometimes pay off big.
I like building things to last. But building something to last when odds of success are 50 to 1 against is foolish. If you are trying to test a startup idea, the only sensible approach is to bet the absolute smallest amount necessary to find out if the idea is worthwhile.
I've built great systems for ideas that didn't work, and it sucks. For example, in 2004 I put together a team and spent 9 months building an awesome implementation of an excellent idea that was just 5 years too early. We were all really proud of our technical work, but since we ended up with a trivial number of users, it was all, in the end, wasted effort.
Later I realized, thanks to people like Eric Ries, that the thing to do early on was to invest just enough to see if there was something to the idea. Most things won't, which means you save enough time to rebuild the few that do properly.
The "think through your ideas" thing is a false hope. You can only think so much about limited data. People can be just as happy working on something they're planning to throw away. Artists often do plenty of sketches before they do the real one, and software developers can do the same.