“Build it and they will come” is almost never a winning strategy. Of course sometimes it works, you build the right thing at the right time and it goes viral, but most of the time you get crickets even if it gets to the top of Product Hunt or Hacker News (neither of which are of any importance outside of tech circles).

The right way is to talk to prospective customers first in a given niche, listen carefully to their problems, and figure out which problems are worth solving, i.e. you have the skills and resources to solve them and people will pay you to solve them. This is difficult if you don’t have a network or experience in specific industries so tech people just wait around for a business person to tell them what to build instead. - HN