Why ideas fail before they are built

Almost every failed small venture we have seen failed the same way. Someone had an idea, liked it, built it, and then went looking for people who agreed. The building took months. The looking took an afternoon and produced a polite no. The months were the expensive part and they were spent before anyone knew whether the answer was yes.

The correction is to treat the problem as the unit you are working on, not the product. A product is one guess about how to solve a problem. If the problem is real, expensive and currently handled badly, you can be wrong about the product three times and still end up with a business. If the problem is not real, the best product in the category is worth nothing, and no amount of execution recovers it.

This reorders what you do first. Before you build, register anything, design a logo or pick a name, you find out whether the problem exists at the size you think it does. That work is unglamorous, costs almost nothing, and is the single highest-return thing in this track.