&gt; Generally you double an engineer&#x27;s salary to arrive at the total cost to the firm of retaining their services.<p>It&#x27;s a fair point thought I do think 1-3 engineers is still plenty for &quot;most&quot; startup products to get to MVP (not universal but general rule of thumb).<p>&gt; You also need to realize just how new and unproven Lean Startup ideas are in the larger context of business. In that world, a million is just getting started. Most software products in the world took much much more than a million dollars to make. You have to pay the project managers, creative team, etc etc.<p>Established (and assumedly) revenue generating software is not the topic of the discussion. The comment I was referring to was that $1m is needed to make a marketable product. Its a bogus claim.