[j45]

Esoteric knowledge of a domain is hyper valuable.

If it's in the B2B space, it's often still about finding which parts are painful enough to pay for is fun.

The long and short of it is people will justify what they want to build what they want without making it customer or market focused.

Building the future is fun, but timing the market is what kills most of those attempts.

Building what's needed now and ready to adopt might grow into something far more, like the first version of Facebook was very simple, not what it grew into (with users in hand learning along the way) to the complex thing it is now.

The metric that matters is people who sign up, use it, and pay. The last one is usually not one that funded startups want to know much about because it actualizes potential and valuations. In that way self-funded startups (or with F2F) has to focus on default-alive economics sooner, which can be great for an idea to hang around until it's time comes.