[mcrady]

I'm highly skeptical of this iteration idea. I've been through this two times and it's taken me two years each time to fully prove out the idea.

Any examples of good businesses that have been proven out in a short period of time?

[swombat]

You can't "prove" anything about businesses until they either finally fail or finally succeed (whatever your definition of failure or success is).

However, you can get a pretty decent idea of how successful an idea will be if you push it further without spending anything like 2 years on it. Most ideas that are invalidated after 2 years of the founders working their bollocks off on the business could have been invalidated much sooner than that.

Ask experienced entrepreneurs (who have built profitable businesses) around you. I think you'll find that most of them already do this to some extent - they don't commit fully into an idea until they've tested the waters and found that this idea is worth committing into.