Thanks for the comment and support though, again I 100% think this is solid advice, but I also believe it certainly does not apply to everyone/all products out there.
That's not building a business, that's hoping you accidentally stumble into one.
Separately, developer tools are extremely hard to build a business around. You can know that by looking at how few success examples there are.
So, where to start:
1 - decide if you want to build a business (available evidence: you don't. you want to play with tech.)
2 - figure out how business work. For starters: you can't afford to reach out for a $25/mo product. Someone buying for a year only returns $300. You cannot make those economics work. But this is all easily learnable, certainly for anyone smart enough to be a competent engineer. But you have to want to.
2a - for typeform, lots of engineers can build that. We pay to not build, and especially not to operate, that.
3 - very candid interviews w/ one of the founders of tally.so are available discussing how the business works.
I have gotten some crazy ideas which I have implemented / are in the back burner (currently a student , but oh man)
This advice is generally right though. I also wish that there is an ideal way of doing things , like how linux manages the kernel he likes and he can live decently or some other project.
You might look at source-based like posthog , some api project used to be like this.
Its really hard earning money in open source. But if you do , that is all so great. Also starred your repo.
Or spend one week building and one week in market learning and getting feedback on it.
This has worked well for me.