“be honest with yourself and scientific about whether what you're working on has enough demand and if you prove it to yourself that it's worth the time investment that you will put in struggling, it will be an order of magnitude easier to prove it to others — to both investors and future team members”

Be scientific about demand before committing engineering months to a build

Rather than encouraging blind persistence, they advocate treating demand validation like a hypothesis test. Proving demand to yourself first makes fundraising and recruiting dramatically easier because conviction becomes evidence-backed rather than emotional — and it forces an honest exit if the evidence doesn't support continuing.