You’re overestimating the importance of business people. Viewing products from a business point of view inevitably leads to inferior products, as the focus is on purely making money. It’s not about making money or about the synergy of business and development. It’s all about creating useful shit for other people to use. You need domain expertise, good taste, and the ability to create value by building things. Focus on money and you’ll be cutting corners, trying to sell useless shit to people who buy it for others to never use.
noduerme|3 years ago
1. Mediocre idea for an app with a lot of funding, raised a competent team of coders, business school grads with no experience in the lead. This will fail. Those guys will take the money and buy jeeps, degrade the product with bad ego-driven ideas, etc.
2. Great idea for an app with no funding, founded by coders. These people will work their ass off all weekend for free. Business people can't see the value; will never see the value; if they touched it they'd ruin it, but they won't touch it. The app launches, gets to the front page of HN, a week later it's dead because there's no business model. Here you could make a case that some business people should have been involved.
3. The ideal case. This is not an idea for an app. This is not really even an app. Someone has a glass factory. Or a small chain of hotels. Their employees are constantly doing things on a whiteboard in the back of the office. They want to expand to more locations and scale up, but the system they have just gets more confusing and complicated the bigger they get, it's really hard to train new employees to use this whiteboard and pass these paper slips around the factory. They come and ask you how you can make it better and you build them an app that they pay for out of pocket, which puts the system up on screens all over the facility. One-off deal. Then they grow and they ask for more apps to manage their customers, their inventory, their billing. Multi-one-off-deals, but now you have an ecosystem you maintain for them.
Those are the business people I'm talking about, not the ones who approach you with an elevator pitch where "it's like Uber but for dogs" or something.