Is the kernel of this advice to start with a known problem which is already solved with a paid service, and then just sell that service more efficiently? That's how I'm interpreting the "skip the R&D phase" idea. In that case I think the question becomes "why is this a better strategy for a startup", since this framing implies going after well-established markets with (at first) an undifferentiated product. Both 'productize' and 'automate' sound like things that incumbents would be able to do more effectively than startups, and likely has already happened in most cases silently in the background.
> "Is the kernel of this advice to start with a known problem which is already solved with a paid service, and then just sell that service more efficiently?"
Yep, this captures what I'm saying.
> "why is this a better strategy for a startup"
If you can build a differentiated product it's great to do that, but it's a lot more difficult/expensive than it used to be.
Incumbent product companies will pursue full automation, but probably won't compete directly with service businesses because it's not their wheelhouse. E.g. GitHub built Copilot and maybe they'll try to ship a "fully automated" AI software engineer. But until their AI software engineer is actually fully automated (which I would guess is 10 years away at least), they won't be competing with software development agencies.
