"Sell before you build" is the tech elite's "let them eat cake". It's literally impossible to do unless you have the right connections and raised funding from t

"Sell before you build" is the tech elite's "let them eat cake". It's literally impossible to do unless you have the right connections and raised funding from the right people. Unless your startup received massive media exposure, nobody will part their money for a product which does not yet exist... You need exposure to massive numbers of people to get any measurable success... And without the right personal connections, it costs a prohibitive amount of money to get that kind of exposure. If you're a developer, it would be cheaper for you to build the thing and then try to grow linearly over the years than to pay the cash up front to achieve that kind of reach... What if your product doesn't measure up to expectations? This is a real risk if you got your customers through advertising (selling a dream) instead of winning them over slowly through a superior offering. The problem with selling a dream is that it's essentially impossible to make reality match the idealised image which you projected into the customer's mind... Even in the cases where it does seem to work out and customers make repeat purchases, the product may just be a superficial representation of what the customer actually needed and it could take them a few years to figure out that the product was itself just an extension of the dream, a shell of a solution... There are better alternatives out there.