When I got into SAAS, I thought it went like this:
- Build a project you have in your head
- Profit
No one told me about validation, marketing, and sales! And I only figured it out 6 months after coding up my first project, finding 0 users. Why is it so hard to understand the importance of these concepts for programmers? It’s like we insist on only learning them after we fail.
Failure is often a prerequisite to learning.
Eric Ries book “The Lean Startup” is worth a read - instead of spending months building something, to only then learn that users don’t want it, it explores ways of testing your ideas and learning those lessons much earlier on in the process.