One of the toughest things for younger people and engineers to understand is how crazy complicated most businesses are these days. Growing up and going to school, everything is explained in a few sentences. Insurance is a bunch of people pooling their money to deal with risk. Logistics is the process of getting something or someone from point A to point B as quickly as possible.
So a couple smart young men thinks, "Let's make AirBnB for <industry>. At a high enough level of abstraction, it's just matching buyers and sellers." Then one of two things happen.
(A) They talk to a bunch of people in <industry> and realize that people have spent decades learning these industries and it's going to be a long slog to even understand what's going on in <industry>.
(B) They don't talk to anybody and build a simple marketplace in a few months and get very little traction. Then they either do (A) or go out of business.
A lot of good startup advice these days can be summed up as "talk to customers." Hopefully all that talking means you're actually learning something.
I agree with talking to your customers, however one thing you wish to avoid is talking too much with your competitors and other "industry people".
Some industries are broken because all of the players have the same mindset. If they can keep things this way they can keep new competitors from being a large threat and their old customers paying too much for substandard product. You still need to innovate even if your competitors say it can't be done.
Balancing knowledge acquisition with a desire to change things can be difficult thing.
SpotHero spent A LONG time very quietly struggling to line up initial supply, deals and product. Years. During that time they seem to have figured out that commercial spots, and making the commercial parking experience 10x better was the opportunity. Then they went after it.
@swamp40 - I agree, and it's great to see that spot hero has taken off in Chicago. Likewise, ParkWhiz has been doing very well. I'd attribute their success to migrating their focus away from the "I'll list my spot online so you can rent it" model to the commercial parking lot and garage yield management space.
Both startups allow users to take advantage of the former model, but they've been able to meet demand by working with parking lots and garages.
It's really interesting that the OP came back 2 years later to analyze why they failed. I think it takes a lot of time to discover the root causes of a failure (or a success) as opposed to what you think are causes, but are actually symptoms.
So a couple smart young men thinks, "Let's make AirBnB for <industry>. At a high enough level of abstraction, it's just matching buyers and sellers." Then one of two things happen.
(A) They talk to a bunch of people in <industry> and realize that people have spent decades learning these industries and it's going to be a long slog to even understand what's going on in <industry>.
(B) They don't talk to anybody and build a simple marketplace in a few months and get very little traction. Then they either do (A) or go out of business.
A lot of good startup advice these days can be summed up as "talk to customers." Hopefully all that talking means you're actually learning something.