Without commenting on the rest of your point, this part:
If my quality is, say, a 7⁄10, my level of success should be somewhere in that ballpark. Maybe the market would be inefficient and I’d only reach a 5⁄10 or a 4⁄10. Or maybe I’d be lucky and reach an 8⁄10 or 9⁄10.
is something I don’t think you should necessarily have expected from a market to begin with. Assuming that your startup was in a scalable field (e.g. a software company as opposed to a restaurant) with an efficient market, what you expect to happen is that quality 7⁄10 should lead to success0⁄10 - there is no reason that anyone would buy from you when they could instead buy from a 10⁄10.
In reality there are lots of reasons this isn’t quite the case. Maybe your product is 7⁄10 overall but genuinely the best in the world for certain specific users/use cases. (C++ and Python both continue to exist). Maybe the market just isn’t very efficient and some people end up buying inferior products. (PHP also continues to exist). But on the whole expecting a 7⁄10 product to experience a 7⁄10 success is not actually what you should expect to see.
Agreed. I think the caveat you make about some people preferring one and others preferring another use case is an important one, but in general I agree that my logic was wrong and it’s an important mistake to avoid.
Without commenting on the rest of your point, this part:
is something I don’t think you should necessarily have expected from a market to begin with. Assuming that your startup was in a scalable field (e.g. a software company as opposed to a restaurant) with an efficient market, what you expect to happen is that quality 7⁄10 should lead to success 0⁄10 - there is no reason that anyone would buy from you when they could instead buy from a 10⁄10.
In reality there are lots of reasons this isn’t quite the case. Maybe your product is 7⁄10 overall but genuinely the best in the world for certain specific users/use cases. (C++ and Python both continue to exist). Maybe the market just isn’t very efficient and some people end up buying inferior products. (PHP also continues to exist). But on the whole expecting a 7⁄10 product to experience a 7⁄10 success is not actually what you should expect to see.
Agreed. I think the caveat you make about some people preferring one and others preferring another use case is an important one, but in general I agree that my logic was wrong and it’s an important mistake to avoid.