“I had $20k/month in AWS bills and no revenue”
Do product engineering types have a responsibility to first time founders that goes beyond build and deploy, or is this a case of “It’s everyone’s right to set their own money on fire?”
I’m reflecting on how this year I’ve now seen seven examples of how entities within the Australian tech industry have happily taken significant sums (think $250k) from founders to build lavish MVPs, without feeling beholden to take even basic steps to check if the founder is ready to be building an MVP, like have they:
• Identified hypothesised customers • Defined the problem and solution • Asked customers about interest and willingness to pay • Iterating the above with figma mockups, maybe no-code prototypes
Without these basics, founders normally discover there’s no demand for what they’ve built, but instead of guiding them towards reevaluating and conducting further customer research, all too often our industry is happy to quote up and build more features before they’ve posted even a dollar in revenue.
Rinse and repeat until they run out of money.
It’s heartbreaking, and I think there’s no justification for it.