Money is irrelevant
This YouTube short showed up in my feed with I recently opened the app. David Guetta, one of the biggest DJ, got a reality check when he realized Daft Punk was better than him because they had more talent and were putting more work than him, not because of the resources they had. Guetta realized he was making excuses for himself (kudos to his honesty).
You can relate this feeling with startup founders.
When I started making products, I thought a great product was the result of millions spent on research, marketing, and development. I naively thought that the more the funding, the best your product is. It’s just a lie: great products are the results of a great team (see "Who before What”).
There are two big fallacies founders constantly fall into:
Building a great product is just about having enough money.
If you build it, people will come.
Lots of funding != great product
When you start making a product, what counts is the hard work you put at understanding the problem and building a solution for your users. What you really need is a team of experts in their field who are obsessing on the issue 24/7. At this stage, all you need is one or two engineers, one person to do market research and product design (sort of a product manager) and maybe one designer (a frontend engineer can do the same).
What counts in the early phases is not how much money you have, but rather who is on the team: their skills and their dedication to the project.
With more money, you hire more random people you know nothing about. You will start doing things you should not be doing (e.g., start marketing before you know you have a banger product) which will ultimately take time away from what you should do: build a great product.
Having too much money and resources in the initial phases transforms a builder into a manager, which is a curse. Once the product takes off, you need to get more resources and put more fuel on the fire, but this is never how it’s done in the early phases.
Build it and they will come
Have you heard someone say they have an idea for an App, build it, launch it only to see less than 10 new users? Does the story sound familiar?
We like to think our view of the world is correct and shared with many others. We believe we are right and that we do the right thing. It’s almost always wrong: each of us has their interpretation and vision of facts based on their culture, experience, and their reality. We love to put ideas in our reality distortion field and see facts different than they were. Engineers are often caught in this trap and build a product without getting feedback from users, only to realize that they built a product nobody care. The worst is when instead of accepting their mistake and starting from scratch, they double down and make excuses as to why the product has no traction nor retention. This starts a vicious circle that only ends when funding and resources dry up and the shop closes down.
The other reason nobody comes to your product is because of habits. Changing users habits is extremely hard, which is why users frequently don’t switch to other solutions (such as going from iPhone to Android, searching with anything else than Google, etc.). For people to change their habits, they need to have a strong incentive too to do. Users will change only if there is a strong value (amazing product, strong network effects, etc.).
You will only make people come because you built a great product that solves a real issue for your users. And it’s done by a great team who obsess on the product and have great craftsmanship, not because you have millions in the bank to spend.