"Conventional Engineer" wanting to build a product company - How to do that?

Happy to help another engineer on the startup journey! I recommend these other discussions around this topic:

• "One of my dreams is to start my own venture someday. How do I tailor my career accordingly?"
• "Career advancement or building a startup? Which one is harder?"

But my questions are more centered around funding.

In this economy, fundraising is extremely tough - We went through this raising our seed round for Taro. To help with this, I highly recommend applying to startup incubators like Y Combinator.

For such a scenario, do you think the best best is to be able to garner a large amount of users?

At a high-level, here's my quick advice here:

• Talk to users - Build something that solves a problem, not just something that "feels cool" for the sake of starting a company. Having honest conversations with users helps you figure that out. I highly recommend this book to help with that: The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers & Learn If Your Business Is a Good Idea When Everyone Is Lying to You
• Avoid writing code - A lot of products can be "hacked" without a full-stack of proper software: levels.fyi for example started off with Google Sheets as a back-end. Do the manual hacky thing for as long as possible - Focus on getting user signal.
• Create something you would use - Your genuine level of passion will make or break your startup dreams. Avoid starting something in a space purely for the sake of it being trendy.

These are a bit different as they're about side projects, but I highly recommend these masterclasses anyways as many principles still apply:

• [Masterclass] How To Come Up With 100k+ Users App Ideas You Can Build For Free
• [Masterclass] How To Build And Grow Tech Products To 500k+ Users For Free