Without watching the video, my immediate reaction and counterpoint to the headline is...
1) you often don't get to choose the problems to work on; instead, the problems tend to choose you. (A common sentiment in science and math research in addition to business ventures)
2) the best foundation for starting a company is to "scratch your own itch".
3) having 1000 customers who are rabid fans that pay to create a recurring dependable revenue is better than 100,000 so-called "customers" who sign up for a free trial but churn out.
However, after watching the video (relevant mark is 41m55s to 47m05s [1]), Des Traynor's quote is about prioritizing product features that are applicable to a wider base of customers. He's speaking from a B2B product mindset. If your dev team gets distracted by one-off features, you'll end up doing labor-intensive quasi-consulting work instead of building a broadly useful software product. Software can scale but consulting does not. For enterprise software companies, accidental "consulting work" is an insidious problem because you don't realize you're doing it.
[1] https://youtu.be/P6pQyB6ACrk?t=41m55s
1) you often don't get to choose the problems to work on; instead, the problems tend to choose you. (A common sentiment in science and math research in addition to business ventures)
2) the best foundation for starting a company is to "scratch your own itch".
3) having 1000 customers who are rabid fans that pay to create a recurring dependable revenue is better than 100,000 so-called "customers" who sign up for a free trial but churn out.
However, after watching the video (relevant mark is 41m55s to 47m05s [1]), Des Traynor's quote is about prioritizing product features that are applicable to a wider base of customers. He's speaking from a B2B product mindset. If your dev team gets distracted by one-off features, you'll end up doing labor-intensive quasi-consulting work instead of building a broadly useful software product. Software can scale but consulting does not. For enterprise software companies, accidental "consulting work" is an insidious problem because you don't realize you're doing it.
[1] https://youtu.be/P6pQyB6ACrk?t=41m55s