[lusr]

Some great observations here that I've learned the hard way myself.

I have concluded differently, however, based on the following lesson I have learned repeatedly in all areas of life: until you do something, you often don't realize all the potential outcomes available. You can easily sit there today and think "ah but how the hell am I going to get customers?" and then choose never to work on your idea. That's OK - if you have something better to work on (where better = some other idea where positive, realistic evaluations of the "viable business" preconditions have been met and the total score beats the score of the current idea you're evaluating).

But if you don't have something better it's STILL a good plan to start working on your idea because (a) you'll learn something (b) you'll probably be (pleasantly) surprised, either because a solution will materialize that you didn't expect (are you really that brilliant and omnipotent that you can predict all outcomes?), OR because it will lead you to thinking of a new idea that doesn't have the same problem (how many successful start-ups switched ideas half-way through implementation?).

For instance, you might end up building product X that generates you 100,000 users but doesn't make much money, even though it doesn't cost much to run. But in the process of building X, you come up with idea Y, which turns out to be a great idea according to the preconditions but only if you have 10,000 users... ah but look, you can probably advertise Y on X and suddenly you're likely to have the users you need for Y to take off. By working on a problem, you unconsciously and implicitly start exploring related problem spaces. By not working on a problem... you can't solve it, or related problems you might not even have noticed yet.