>On the other hand I've encountered folks who claim to be forming a start up. They've got the name and the logo. They've got the whole pitch ready. They sound enthusiastic and passionate. But... they still have to find a technical person to actually build it. They basically have nothing.
These people are usually imposters who are asking for things that are totally unrealistic or generating interest for a concept that doesn't make any sense from a technical perspective. They have an idea and assume it can be done.
It's sort of like saying "Let's build a perpetual motion machine." Everyone is really interested in it, because it's a total fantasy. If the idea is practical, it's usually not hard to find someone who will implement it.
As a technical person, you know the limits. That means that when you go out and sell people or kick up interest, it will be for something that's at least plausible.
The frank truth is that software and technical work is relatively cheap. It cannot be the basis of your business because someone can come in and clone your product after you've done the hard work of introducing an innovative product and establishing/educating the market (I know because this happened to my business).
It doesn't matter if the clone is way worse than your product, because people are only looking at the very high level. If the clone can provide the basic functionality 20% of the time as opposed to your 99% of the time, if combined with substantive marketing, that's more than enough to win. Anyone who has done any amount of product research knows that the good products are almost never the most common ones.
Your brand, reputation, and intellectual property are 100x more valuable than any software or technical feat. Consider that Google and Facebook could lock 4 engineers in a closet for a year and come out with almost any software they wanted for around $1 million.
Ask yourself why, then, they pay $1B+ for companies like Whatsapp and Instagram. It's certainly not because it's too complex to figure out photo sharing or text messaging. They want the brand and the users that come with it, and it's that simple. The one thing that is most expensive in business is user attention and loyalty.
There are many apps that dominated app stores and were probably hopeful that they would be bought by Google/Apple and achieve fame and fortune, only to find that in the next iteration of the OS, they had been "NetScaped"; their core functionality baked into the OS either as an extension of an existing app (many souped-up camera and photo effects apps) or as a new bundled app (e.g., Keep).
The most important thing for tech entrepreneurs to understand is that while the technology is important and can give an edge, it is not the main value in your business. The main value will always be the brand and the users that come with it (and, as intimated above, beware of platform vendors, because they will always have the option to divert most of your user base to a first-party clone). Technology is comparatively cheap.