If you haven’t watched the Netflix or Hulu documentaries about the Fyre Festival yet, you’re missing out on the craziest startup drama of all time.

The original concept for Fyre was a marketplace for booking talent, like celebrities & musicians. The origin story? Founder Billy McFarland tries to book Ja Rule for a party, realizes the booking industry is broken, and resolves to change it.

It’s not a bad idea either. Certainly no worse than an app for hailing taxis, because “finding a cab in San Francisco is broken.”

So, Billy parlays his good idea into a startup, raises funds, hires a team of devs to turn it into a working product, and seeks out creative ways to market and launch it, including the ill-fated music festival.

Obviously, things went from interesting marketing stunt to full-blown dumpster fyre pretty quickly. But if you look beyond the scam, Billy’s real failure—in my opinion—is that he never validated Fyre’s product/market fit.

Until you know that your customers, and not just investors, want & value your product, you don’t need to spend heavily in marketing or PR.

Bottom line: Don’t be like Billy. Focus on finding your product/market fit first and then look for innovative ways to reach customers.

Also, and I hope this isn’t news to you: don’t lie, scam, or abuse people’s trust.