How Did Decagon Exit the Idea Maze in Three Weeks?

Jesse Zhang says Decagon got out of the idea maze in roughly three weeks, maybe a bit longer. He calls the timing a rough order of magnitude, and it was very fast, because the goal at the start was not to sit there picking an idea.

The team ran something close to sales discovery instead. Most founders avoid questions that feel pushy or salesy. Nobody really cares, and the useful questions are the ones a salesperson asks later: how much do you pay for this, where does the budget come from, how do you justify the ROI internally, and who is involved. Asking whether someone would use a product does not tell you enough. The harder questions are how they decided the product was the obvious thing to build, and how they skipped a long opening phase. Luck still played a part.