Related PG tweet: "When young founders build something that they don't want themselves but that they believe some group of other people want, 90% of the time they're building something no one wants."
And also related: https://mitchellh.com/writing/building-large-technical-proje...
1. If my company were to fail, why would it have happened? 2. What would have to be true in order for the company to succeed?
(From Rob Fitzpatrick's "The Mom Test")
It might be tempting to think this will always be obvious, which is dangerous because other scenarios can appear to be very similar on the surface. e.g the classic, your customers are asking for "a faster horse".
You don't have to be making something as world changing as a car, but if you are trying to get people to switch from a niche horse to a niche car, it simply takes time for people to adjust to your solutions different perspective, to realise that many of the things they are asking for are not fundamental to the problem but artificial, ancillary parts of the old solution.
You can end up second guessing yourself a lot while waiting for the turning point that validates your idea - speaking from experience. To make things more complicated I think there are also going to be scenarios where you are making a car which is only marginally better than a horse, and the fundamental change to approach is just not worth it to people - differentiating all these subtly different things from customers simply not wanting it is not easy, I think people just need to think very deeply about their products and customers to reach the right answers.
Paul Graham: "Almost all founders learn brutal lessons during the first year, but some learn them much more quickly. Obviously those founders are more likely to succeed. So it could be a useful heuristic to ask, say 6 to 12 months in, "Have we learned our brutal lesson yet?"" "The most common lesson is that customers don't want what you're making. The next most common is that it isn't possible to make it, or at least to make it profitably."
Can you make it? Will people want that? Will it make money?