“Put a bunch of smart people together and magic will happen”.
You will hear this refrain often repeated.
Sometimes companies – #startups or bigger will actually follow this.
Smart engineers (yes that is usually the case) will come together.
On their own, or will be brought together by someone with money.
And they will do what they know best – start building.
Unfortunately this is not adequate for building a business.
Knowledge of building something cool – innovative or even useful is good.
But it doesn’t have much to do with marketing and selling of such products or tools.
It also doesn’t have anything to do with knowing whether anybody would be interested in buying what the engineers are building.
It does not take into account whether the problem being solved is actually worth solving.
It does not consider that people may be living with that problem and be fine with it.
Yes, periodically the magic will happen – once in a blue moon.
Usually what will happen is that there will be no market for what is built.
Engineers will blame the market, customers, economic conditions, investors…
But really the only people to blame are the…
Skill of building a product and skill of building a product business are 2 different skills…
Both are required to build a successful product business.
What do you think?
P.S. I have nothing against engineers, I am one too…