> Building a profitable business reduces both the problem and the solution space by a huge margin, and if you can find a way to get rid of that, the space opens up.

That's one way to look at it. Usually though, for upstarts, what's paramount is not the profits part, but the risks inherent in working on a solution for a perceived problem (or worse, for customers one is ill-placed to sell to [0]). I like what Seibel recommends: the v1 must solve an acute problem for the customer to pay up [1]. From there, building out a holistic product may put our upstart on path to growth & profitability while simultaneously expanding the scope of the problem space building such a product brings [2].

[0] https://www.michaelseibel.com/blog/users-you-don-t-want

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13109480

[2] https://apenwarr.ca/log/20211024