Devs should spend a lot more time on research to select the problem they want to solve. This is "top of the funnel" in the sense that it will affect everything

Devs should spend a lot more time on research to select the problem they want to solve. This is "top of the funnel" in the sense that it will affect everything else, from product to marketing, and has the highest impact on the ultimate success of the product. > Finding a customer category that regularly spends money on the kind of software you're intending to build can make it signficantly easier to actually sell them software. I want to point out that this applies to the market, and not necessarily the product. An oft-repeated suggestion is to charge more, but free products are great for lead-gen. Case-in-point: indiehackers.com is not a paid product, yet it sold for 7 figures. Traffic from a targeted, lucrative demographic is inherently valuable, and one of the easiest ways to get this traffic is with a free product. When starting out, the biggest risk is 1. making something that no-one wants 2. making something people want, but not being able to reach those people. The easiest way to derisk these categories of mistakes is to simply copy the market (ie. what problem to solve) and acquisition channels of competitors, and differentiate on product. On moats: Markets with moats are typically already dominated by incumbents with moats. For indies it's better to target markets without moats, precisely because you're in the position of a "fast follower"