$5 or $500, at least this academy recognises that the best person to write the whitepaper is the project owner. There's no substitute really.
Exactly. Except maybe a writer who becomes so familiar with the subject that they practically become one of the project owners.
How would that be possible unless the project launched without a whitepaper?
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As you said yourself, the coding can (and often does) happen after the idea has been defined and described in detail in the first iteration(s) of the whitepaper. Kind of depends what you mean by project "launch" - the start of the fundraising or the release of the software/platform.