>> For 99% of software businesses, the tech can cause the business to fail but its almost never what makes the business succeed. Things like customer development and sales are actually far more important.

I STRONGLY disgree with your take as a universal take. At the pre-Seed stage, the technology is the only thing. Without that, you dont have a technical business. You just have a pitch deck.

Of course, once you prove out the idea and reach product market fit, that enables you to either have cashflow or raise funding -- so technology becomes less critical because you can use the $ to hire technologists.

If "mapping market demand to technical products" was really the money printer, every management consultant would be running a unicorn. Every MBB consultant would have a side startup. You actually need the technical product, or some MVP of it, to map a market demand to it, to do demos, to raise funding. If you dont, you just have a pitch deck. Sure, if you can raise on a pitch deck, that is winning, but how many can?