[joeemison]

For evolutionary features, you're right. But I think the point in the article is that if you're trying to get to product-market fit, your customers' feature suggestions are rarely the ways to get there; you generally have to watch, think, synthesize, hypothesize, and iterate again and again to get to the solution that actually does what you need done.

[encoderer]

That's a little too hand-wavy for me. I think you solve a problem, produce an acceptably bad solution, and as you get traction you improve it. You do it evolutionary because you're not Steve Jobs and improving something continuously is a repeatable, adaptable technique in a way that spontaneous invention isn't. If you never get traction, and can't crack it, then you invested a minimal amount and you can move on. A portfolio approach.

I think this is true for both big ideas and little ones. I guess there may be some nuggets of truth deep down in the cw that "users don't know what they want until you give it to them" but I think it's mostly an over-used canard.

[ben_jones]

I think product-market fit is more then just making sales. It's having a sustainable company that can "service" those sales in a sane way. If your company is completely back logged and getting by by cutting corner after corner, you're not succeeding.. you're teetering on an edge.

There's an argument for the mental health of the founders as well as the soundness of the company.

[mpbm]

I think that's repeatable and adaptable for two reasons:

1) technology keeps changing and it's usually easier to just write new software to take advantage of new infrastructure or design assumptions or whatever

2) almost nobody who has the expertise to do so gets paid to research pre-existing software, test it out, and find something that already exists that does the job. However, there is a large financial incentive to sell people on why they should use your new thing

So, there is never-ending opportunity to sell something new that solves the same old problem. It's a marketing-driven approach. You're basically just exploring the frontier of what people are willing to pay for, rather than the frontier of what's technically possible. It's "there's a sucker born every minute" style repeatable.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. People would have had to pay for research/adaptation to find an existing solution, so paying for development of a brand new solution is the same money. And marketing is one of those skills that's necessary no matter what your approach, so laying a foundation on top of it makes sense.

They're just two different approaches. The big idea approach isn't hand-wavy, it's just less common than the marketing driven approach. I think maybe it seems hand-wavy when people try to wear the big idea's skin like a mask cuz they don't actually have a big idea and everybody's like "grandma, what big teeth you have".