Yeah, a lot of engineers look at business and think "Well, it can't be that hard..." And it's not -- but you don't have as much control over things as most foun

Yeah, a lot of engineers look at business and think "Well, it can't be that hard..." And it's not -- but you don't have as much control over things as most founders pretend to, and you're really at the whims of your customers. I think you're right, a lot of engineers start with a solution in mind and that's the wrong way to go about this. Sure, you can spend a month building a prototype to validate your idea, but if your idea is something that nobody is willing to pay you for, it's not going to make a good business. That's what the phrase "do things that don't scale" means -- go out, find something that someone is willing to pay you to do, and do it at a discount so you can work the inefficiencies out of the process. If nobody is willing to pay you to do it manually, it's not a market worth chasing. The vast majority of products are simply new implementations of an old idea/service with some enabling technologies under the hood that allow you to do those things with less overhead (thus you can undercut your competitors for a sustained advantage).