Comment bait title aside... That's why you do it in steps: you build the bulk of your product first before you have customers and need investment and then you shift your time to other things. Nobody is going to hire an engineer to free themselves up to pitch for money to pay for the engineers until that is a sound decision.
That's sort of the obvious thing, but on the other side you have people that you can't do any really meaningful product development without customers, or you're likely to build something nobody wants. Is there a good balance there?
