Really? Some parts of this website used to push that hard back in the "MVP" phase. And I've been here nearly as long as you (I made an account much later after lurking for years) -- what was that start-up that was a website that literally fed into an excel spreadsheet, to fake having a real product?
The growth hacking stuff took that idea even further, and for quite a while was all over this website.
That said, I disagree with said "wisdom", I just find it interesting that we've got diametrically opposed views on how this website perceived it!
It's what I commonly see on startup fora including HN, reddit, IndieHackers etc. There's books about this method like Lean Startup, Mom Test and so on.
The advice to build first and market later is actually advice that is much maligned in my experience, as there are too many stories of engineers who build and then find out they can't actually sell their product because they focused too much on the building and not enough on getting people to know about it.
In which case, Web3? If so, I don't think the market is prepped at all, I don't really see people using it for what proponents say it'll be used for. If some other case, please elucidate me, I'm not sure what you're referring to otherwise.
Indeed, the worst is when they don't actually solve any problems whatsoever, they treat it as a way to have fun building the product, using new technologies, new architectures etc.
There's nothing wrong with building to learn but the problem arises when engineers think building automatically leads to business success; the two are often entirely disjointed. WordPress is maligned as well but it's wildly successful for Automattic.
Maybe it's not common wisdom in general, but it is a pretty common viewpoint in the startup world. Building products is expensive, and startups can't afford to build something no one wants. It's pretty much universal advise that finding an initial market fit should be the first priority of any new startup.
Literally making a sale before the product exists is the extreme end of that philosophy. Whether or not this is good advise, or even possible, probably depends a lot on the domain. For most domains though, there is some degree of market research that can and should be done before investing in product development.
I've been on this website a long time and I suppose the userbase has grown quite a bit. I don't assume everyone has read all of Paul Graham's articles or even know who he is, but are you familiar with how YCombinator works?
Enough money to survive on ramen for a few months and build a demo. Get feedback from users and iterate over and over.
I know multiple people personally who have been through YC, and I'm not sure what point you are trying to make.
Not every company that goes through YC are at the same stage. I've heard of companies joining YC despite already having over a million in ARR because of how valuable the YC network is.
YC invests 125k in each team, which is certainly enough to last more than a few months eating ramen if you are building the product yourself.
Also, trying to sell a product using a demo is not exactly the same as selling a finished product. At 0-1 stage, you can bet the demo hides the rough edges to some degree.
I would say selling using a demo falls somewhere on the sell-before-build spectrum, but one point I was trying to make is that it is not necessarily black-and-white.
The point is that YC's model contradicts what you said. It's relatively inexpensive to build an initial version of a product. Build something as quickly as possible, get user feedback, and keep iterating.
I can guarantee you won't find anything Paul Graham has written about doing a bunch of marketing analysis as a first step.
I said market research, not marketing analysis. I don't mean focus groups and A-B tests and ad words.
No YC company is literally in stage 1 of its existence. First you need to get into YC, and you probably won't if you don't know anything about the market you are trying to reach.
> Enough money to survive on ramen for a few months and build a demo. Get feedback from users and iterate over and over.
This is indeed the original idea behind YCombinator. That was a very long time ago. Things have changed, both with the YCombinator company and the ethos of this web community.
To get decent anagram lengths and complexity, implement the numbers as a dict of repetitions of primes, and implement the multiplication by summing the repetitions. ;-)
In which case you can just compare the dicts without performing the multiplication (which happens to be the costliest part for arbitrary-precision integers).
In all the interviews I've been a part of (1.5 years, maybe ~50 candidates), I've never seen a candidate decline because of salary requirements. We would decide if they were a good hire, and HR would make it happen.
So that's another datapoint confirming empirically patio11's idea that candidates are underasking. If they would ask for their fair value, 50% of companies would decline their candidature because of the price.
I don't agree this is the common wisdom, and it's kind of a surprising take to see on this website specifically.