One thing I'm realizing is that you can quickly spend tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars building products only for no one to use them and the money basically having gone to waste.

Def feels like the most expensive game of trial and error to ever exist.

Onchain is the new online - FID 206 -  Building /coop-recs

Indeed
That's why marketing is an important factor in building

Yep, that’s why I think building something you believe in, something you’re proud of, is always more important than building for the money. 

Your endeavor may not work either way, so build something you’re proud of.

running into this, where building agents with access to whatsapp/tg has distribution 100x+ beyond crypto. No matter that farcaster/lens/XMTP has certain benefits for auth/payments

the most expensive thing you end up spending. is not the money. It’s the time

Business bring losses everytime. Perseverance in what you are doing is the key

shipping open-source allows us to take the tech from one failed startup to bootstrap the next idea.

I see each day as a death / failure. 

Keep costs as low as possible.

Ship the lessons open source daily.

Wake up inspired to build something new bringing your experience from the day before.

If you think you need to spend X amount of weeks/days/hours working to launch the first version of something, really start to believe that X/2 and X/3 is likely more optimal.

I've progressively learned this over the years from values of X = 4 months, then 1.5, then 3 weeks, and so on... I launched the initial version of /amp after a few days, the semantic search after just 2. I launched the AI-generated homepage (ampcast.xyz/news) with about 3 hours of work on the first prototype - it turned into one of the top launches on the network that day, but I was genuinely surprised and was expecting just a few people to try it out and give me feedback, and instead I've had over a thousand land on the page that day.

Shaving scope is its own challenge - but unnecessary delay in launching hurts your learning. Launch faster.

For software startups (not hardware) you should really shave the scope down to a series of tests, not a full blown bells and whistles singular product launch. I like what @nt said about it

For software startups (not hardware) you should really shave the scope down to a series of tests, not a full blown bells and whistles singular product launch. I like what @nt said about it

https://warpcast.com/nt/0xe49c8a94

definitely true, but as long as you don't overdo it you often learn a lot in the process that helps in the future, even if it isn't apparent at the time
1000 $farther

This is most of our industry at the moment, unfortunately

It's a very bad feeling. I understand it.

probably why hardware projects are difficult to scale up and find pmf for?

it's not waste in the same way that soldiers aren't wasted in the attempt to win a war.

need to fund 100 startups to get 1 breakout success. usually, that one will define a category and change the world.

if you didn't fund 100, you may never get the 1.

Usually starting with asking is better/cheaper than building.  There's so many useful forms of fidelity before actual code.  Know what success would mean as soon as possible.

That said, I think the bar for most users has gotten quite high - they're jaded by what's possible now.

if you think that's expensive wait until you hear about the financial stockmarket...

Same kind of thing is true with music. You can spend years producing music alone in a room and then find out it doesn’t resonate with people. I think touring acts have an advantage cause they can try songs for a real audience and get real feedback along the way