| I'm pretty sure amazon and facebook started without problems to solve. Facebook was trying to make a better social network compared to hi5 and friendster before it. Apple made a personal home computer that was accessible to anyone who wanted one or build it Amazon started with book deliveries with a goal of distributing everything and doing it much better. There is a bezos interview out here. It's OK to build something that exists in the world but to some degree it is a vanity exercise relative to your experience with that thing or domain. It's fine to build something you think should exist, but it should be seen for what it is - a project, and not a product until an addressable market and audience is found who pay to sign up and there's low churn. Building some of what you want and including feedback from a market is something. Otherwise (it's fine), it can be a lot of folks wanting to exercise their inner Steve Jobs visionary ways without remembering he had a few billion in backing to do as he wished with a track record. Lean startup is more about betting more than on just one version of your idea that you think needs to be built today, it's about finding enough hypotheses to test before doubling down. It's more of a science than an art (that may or may not work out) Having plenty of contact with reality is still kind of vague, if it's relative to what's important to you for a confirmation bias effect, so be it. But simply putting in the conversations constantly and including a part of your roadmap between what you want to build, what customers are saying, bug fixes, and long term dev (5-10%) can lower your risk much more. |