Now you&#x27;re backpedaling while accusing me of doing so.<p>&gt; I could have a Snapchat clone developed easily for $100k - probably considerably less<p>Bearing in mind that a Snapchat clone by itself wouldn&#x27;t be marketable, you&#x27;d need a lot of marketing to differentiate it, so could I. But you and I have expertise, and expertise is valuable and needs to be factored into the price. That&#x27;s the point I&#x27;m trying to make. My old CEO knows nothing about software, he paid half a million for an e-commerce site. For a real software product built by someone who doesn&#x27;t know what he&#x27;s doing, a million dollars is the minimum. Anyone who comes to the table with less than that is going to get really badly burned.<p>If you come to the table with half a million worth of expertise, and zero dollars of capital, you will probably fail unless you focus hard on getting funded. I&#x27;d rate the skill of getting funded as worth around $150-200K. If you don&#x27;t already have it, you&#x27;re going to have to pour in more of your blood, sweat and tears.<p>&gt; it would seem that people believe you need $1m in the bank before you can go to market.<p>No, they understand the meaning of &quot;a million dollars of your own blood, sweat and tears&quot;.<p>It does absolutely no good to would-be founders if they try their hand at doing a startup thinking it&#x27;s going to be easy. When I see these kinds of post-mortems, I see that clearly, a million bucks worth of effort wasn&#x27;t put in. They worked too hard, and not smart enough. They didn&#x27;t have the expertise to enter the market that they wanted to be in. They may not have literally thought that all of their competitors and potential partners were stupid and &#x2F; or naive, but their business model implicitly assumed it. They failed to de-risk the business and the risk killed them.