Keep in mind that if you never raise again, YC still owns 7% so they have no reason to complain. If you're successful, 500k for 7% will have been a good deal.
Selling an expensive product or service is very different from committing fraud or stealing. There are plenty of practices within banking that are a lot more immoral than charging high fees.
Here are two obvious ways that work (I've used both):
- Save up for a 3 month runway, for example by freelancing on the side of your day job.
- Do the startup on the side. Potentially dialling down you day job effort to 75%.
Most startups will benefit from a pilot/MVP stage, perhaps you can reach that stage working only evenings?
I suppose the real question is if you really need to maintain the same standard of living. If you have a well paid tech job you can probably survive not spending like someone making 250 k, at least for a few months.
But isn't Peloton fairly unique? Like Crossfit, it somehow has gained a huge following that is not directly related to the actual product, it's much more about marketing nous.
That is much harder to reproduce than simply building a solid physical product.
Didn't the non-touchbar version have lower specs? I'm pretty sure I tried speccing the other one to the same level and the price difference was very small.
Why would you NOT spend money on a calculator app if it’s better, or you just fancy it?
An iPad pro costs 1000 bucks and your time is probably worth around 100 bucks an hour, so if an app is good and costs less than 25 bucks you shouldn’t even stop to think before buying it.
A person with a well paid job that thinks twice about paying 5 bucks for anything he could potentially use for work even once is doing it wrong.
The “file system” is not new, the files app is at least a year old. What they added now was just zip support (really needed) and USB sticks (I don’t care but many love this).
Don’t listen to all the whining podcasters that claim that ipad doesn’t have a file system. The files app and its integration into many apps works amazingly well, especially in conjunction with icloud drive. And you can access the local directories, so you can put a video file in the VLC folder or a PDF in the Acrobat folder. You can of course also AirDrop to the ipad already into these apps, but if you want complete control.