[esafak]

Your product could be boring and useless except to a niche audience, but still a great business opportunity. In that case, people will only work on it for the money, and that is fine. Some ideas are simply harder to sell to potential employees:

    “We’re making the world a better place through paxos algorithms for consensus protocols.”
    “We’re making the world a better place though software defined data centers for cloud computing.”
    “We’re making the world a better place through canonical data models to communicate between end points.”
    “We’re making the world a better place through scalable, fault tolerant distributed databases with acid transactions.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8C5sjjhsso

[notahacker]

Yeah, I think the big difference is that devs might actually [be the only people to] think those sound like interesting problems to work on, whereas making the world a better place through [equivalent jargon in niche logistics/tax/pensions etc] only excites a small number of people who aren't devs, especially if it's not that much of a technical challenge and the hypothetical moat is just sales and business logic. Which leaves money, and unless the founder with the business model hires rather than looking for tech cofounders, it's really only a possibility of future money for working unpaid on something they don't understand on offer...