I'm guessing this is coming off the discussion DHH and PG had in another thread and... wow. I've never seen such intelligent people waste so much time arguing w

I'm guessing this is coming off the discussion DHH and PG had in another thread and... wow. I've never seen such intelligent people waste so much time arguing word choice. What a waste of time. Different kind of "entrepreneurial enterprises" can be successful in different ways - and most of us would be happy with either kind of success. So let's be specific as to what has the highest probability of success. PG advocates iterative design throughout the product - he mentions it repeatedly in his essays and talks, that startups should start somewhere which looks good and change their ideas "en route". It seems to me that DHH might call this "trying to give turds wings" - instead, he advocates starting with an idea which will have a strong market to start with, like Basecamp. Then you can work a productive 4-day week working on "objectives [which] are reasonably clear". PG would argue that most of the time, the objectives should never be too clear - in the sense that we should keep an flexible mindset about what we are building. I guess the unknowns we don't agree on are: 1) How many "obvious" market niches are there, where at least 2,000 users will pay you $40/month? In his SS2008 talk, DHH hypothesizes that there are many, but as far as I can tell, it's just a hunch. 2) What is the probability of hitting one of those niches, and what is the probability of getting acquired/going IPO using "iterative design" to traverse the space of ideas? I don't think there are enough data available to really say. Since there aren't enough data to make a call statistically, both PG and DHH argue from their experiences - which differ. Both are right to claim that you can be successful either way, so I guess the best way to make a call is based on an individual's personality.