You just described the difference between a project and a business. All businesses are projects, but not all projects are businesses. There is nothing wrong with creating projects for the sake of creating projects. But if you are trying to create a business, market and marketing come first and you should consider them way before writing your first line of code.

I still disagree. Just because something isn't business viable doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. You should pretty much always do it - then decide if there's a market/think about how to market for it.

A business for the sake of just making a business feels wrong. A business for the sake of making an awesome product feels right.

He meant that if your goal is to make money with a business, then you should start with businessy stuff like figuring out if there's a market for what you want to build.

You're free to start a business by building the product of your dreams, but no matter how much you personally like it, there's no guarantee people will pay for it. In other words, if you want money, but start with building a product, you're likely to have a bad time.

But if you just want to build an awesome product, and don't care about whether you make any money with it, then there's no problem.

You seem to be implicitly thinking of 'marketing' as pejorative.

I'd suggest instead that identifying an audience for a potential product is actually part of making an awesome product.

There's a pretty wide stretch of territory between not caring whether something is business viable and only caring about building a successful business.

Meh - there's a lot of people out there scratching itches that are nothing more than minor inconveniences.