Most top level shit is.

I once watched as a market research tool we’d planned but hadn’t even started building was pitched to the CEO of a Fortune 500 for a $100k project claiming it was already finished and using an image off Google Images of a stylized biological structure under a microscope that was our visualization inspiration as if it was the final product.

We got the sale and eventually did build the thing, the client was very happy, and eventually the tool was even whitelabled by one of the FAANG companies. The person who pitched it, who was already a big deal, went on to be a much bigger deal, eventually turning down an offer to be CEO at one of the 20 largest companies in the world.

While it’s a mistake to fake what you can’t build (I have cautionary tales about folks that did that), faking what you can and will build in order to build momentum to launch is not as uncommon as people might think.