Unfortunately the reality is that you will almost definitely not have a bulletproof idea from the get go. And even if you do achieve product market fit, you may (read: probably will) lose it after x months/years. Good enough is what you are going for here. And then just ship.
My company is currently at tens of millions in revenue and we still don't have a bulletproof, defensible product. But we have the space and time to iterate towards it.
We are a bootstrapped ~2.5yr old company that is doing $5M in Revenue and ~$2M in PBT. We have fallen into a bit of a funk in the past 6-12M or so growth-wise and basically flat-lined. We are talking to a few funds to raise a ~$10M round (mostly secondary) to bring the PBT down to 0 and really swing for the fences. We've thought about applying to YC but the 7% seems high for us at this stage. Is YC interested in co-investing the standard YC amount in such a round at the market valuation instead of standard YC valuation?
https://www.openproblemgarden.org/category/graph_theory?sort...
Obviously not an exact measurement but to give you some sense of the importance of the problem