[gregorvand]

Always ask yourself as an engineer if "building the thing" is more alluring than "the thing". After you build, you have a thing that needs to be sold. As engineers, it is all too easy to be swept up building the thing without taking a step back to see will anyone actually use this? As painful as it is, my advice to the author or any others out there is if "the thing" is truly what you believe in, then you can test it out without building, anything. In this case, could the author have made fantastic Craigslist ads for a few people offering services first and checked in on the progress first? (I am slightly re-telling the story here of FanDuel than used Craigslist ads to test market sentiment before building anything). Good luck out there, all.