If it makes you feel better, I’m at a start up right now and we definitely are not polished yet!
But as a point of reference to maybe give insight to your question, the last time I joined a start up was 21 years ago. Here are some differences I have noted:
- Stunningly vast array of high quality, open source tools, platforms, and frameworks. Some of this stuff we had to pay for. A lot of it wasn’t very good or limited. Even more of it we had to invent ourselves.
- Cloud services. I, all by myself, can write some YAML and have an industry-standard, production-ready stack published to the Internet and ready for traffic in a couple of hours. Of course, I’ll pay out the nose if it hits big, but compare this to the extremely high barrier to entry when I spent weeks or months planning out infrastructure, procuring and deploying hardware, configuring endless firmware/software, tuning, testing, building out failover, backup strategies, and a billion other things, not to mention the actual software I want to deliver.
- Available talent. Extraordinary engineers and developers have always been hard to find, but good enough ones are fairly plentiful, especially now that you’re no longer limited to hiring or moving people local.
- Freely available knowledge. You younger folks shit constantly on Stack Overflow and the likes, but y’all don’t know how good you have it now. Blogs, vlogs, online and often open courses, SO/reddit, ChatGPT, etc. enable you to go from zero to hero in minutes, where I often had to spend days or weeks to figure something out for myself or to find some wizard in a dark cave to share their arcane knowledge.
- Established patterns. People have written voluminous books and blogs about precisely how to build large scale and high quality applications and systems, and as we discussed, a lot of the tools are readily available to you with little or no money involved.
It’s called commoditization. As for appearing to already have customers ready to go: I think the low barrier to entry allows people to more freely experiment with ideas closer to a potential customer, get it in front of them, and further build out
from there fairly quickly and organically. That, however, is no guarantee it will be a sustainable business.