[staunch]

"I think there's some value to actually thinking about business models earlier in the process. Simply identifying market opportunity (i.e. how do you make money)"

I think at least it's a valuable exercise to imagine that you're not going to have a free version of your product. Imagine that you're actually selling it to a real customer. Would you be embarrassed to say it costs money? How would support work differently? How about uptime? Who would actually pay?

I'm not sure that's necessary in all cases, but it does seem to raise a lot of interesting questions useful for self-examination.