Finding Product Market Fit
I had a startup about a year ago whose &quot;product&quot; was collecting the career wisdom of alums 5-10 years out and sharing it with undergrads so that they didn&#x27;t have to make the same mistakes that everyone else did.  All of the alums, professors, and mentors we talked to about loved the idea, and were more than willing to share their wisdom.  We built it, we collected stories, we launched...and students derived basically zero value from it.  The problem was that without actually being in the situation that lead to those mistakes, they were unable to contextualize the advice: it was all just random words, good in theory but not interesting or actionable.  Some things can only be learned by experience.<p>Ironically, though this meant the death of the startup, it actually served its intended purpose <i>for me and my cofounder</i> - the experience of actually doing the market research, building it, responding to feedback, and launching taught us a lot about what we wanted out of our careers, what we were good at, and what would be a blind alley.<p>I suspect that finding product&#x2F;market fit is similar.  I know about 8-10 people who have successfully built a startup.  In all cases but one, they spent at least a year, usually 18-24 months floundering around without any idea what they were doing.  These were not uninformed people - they had all read Hacker News, Lean Startup, every blog post and Paul Graham article they could get their hands on, etc, and in most cases had worked for or even founded startups before.  In my case, we actually did the 100+ or so customer interviews, we got great initial feedback, we put mocks of our preliminary product designs in front of prospective users and got &quot;Oh yeah, we&#x27;d definitely use that, let us know as soon as it&#x27;s done!&quot;, and still got no users once we built it.<p>It just takes 18-24 months to develop the kind of deep knowledge necessary to build something innovative.  That&#x27;s working full-time and assuming you take all the shortcuts available to you.  And that&#x27;s time to the point where you have a viable <i>idea</i> - on top of that, it&#x27;s usually 3-6 months to build out a prototype, and unless you&#x27;ve gotten very lucky with social connections, that&#x27;s the <i>beginning</i> point of where you might viably get seed funded.  Profitability is usually 2-3 years beyond that.<p>Budget accordingly, and don&#x27;t get discouraged when you&#x27;re a year in and don&#x27;t have a clue what you&#x27;re doing.