Open source as a free, entrenched option

A lot of early-stage founders have understood—mostly because more and more people are talking about their early-stage strategies—that you need to validate your ideas. You need to make an effort to figure out if the thing you're planning to do is actually reasonable to attempt. Validation is important and absolutely worth doing prior to building.

That much, many people have understood.

But here's where things get interesting. Often enough, validation looks like checking if people have the problem—checking if people have the challenge that your idea solves. And if you find people complaining about it, if you find people mentioning that they struggle with this, to some founders, that's a sufficient reason to build a software-as-a-service solution.

Then they bring it to market and realize something frustrating: even if they directly engage people in their market, even if they directly show this and onboard people into the product, they still don't get a sale.

People stick with what they're currently doing, even though it is something that, from your perspective as a founder, is much worse, much more expensive, much more complicated, much less scalable.

Why is that?

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