[ricklamers]

The way I like to evaluate advice like this is by taking a selection of successful businesses/founders I know and applying the advice to those cases.

For example, I know of one company that very successfully gamed Google search to drive massive traffic to low value pages but pages that give a tiny bit of value to consumers looking to buy a house. Enough to drive ad income to live off very very comfortably.

You see, that business success has little to do with the novelty of the solution (does this exist already?) or deep insights into the customer needs (what do customers really want?). It’s mostly clever exploitation of specific market conditions (cheap to build websites, Google ranks your site for free, lots of people in need of housing, easy to sell ads to many different companies through an intermediary).

I almost feel like the article pushes this idealized view of how to build a successful company that is actually rarely the right recipe to success in practice.