I've seen a lot of startups that did plenty of market research (including both my last failed startup and my last employer), but I've yet to see one get anything useful out of it.
There're a couple of pitfalls to be wary of when doing market research, like:
1.) Confirmation bias. At my last employer, we had an intern spend all summer calling prospective customers. He called 30-40 organizations and got through to a grand total of 2 executives, who were sorta lukewarm about the idea. Then my boss said, "Well, I think there's enough interest to move forwards with this project." Then we busted our ass for a year, put it in front of a bunch of other customers, incorporated their feedback, and it still didn't sell.
2.) Not having something for people to react to. People don't know what they want, but if you show them something, they can often tell you whether they like it or not, and possibly suggest things they do want.
3.) Calling the wrong people. It doesn't help to get the input of people who won't use your product anyway. This can be kinda tricky though, since you often don't know who'll end up using your product ahead of time.
I think that's it. It takes very little in the way of tangible resources to build software. The biggest thing people need is skill, and they tend to believe they're skilled even in the face of contradictory evidence.
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I've yet to meet at single software statup founder that "spend (s) enough time researching the business idea to see if it's viable".
I wonder if that is due to the very low barrier to entry with software.
I've seen a lot of startups that did plenty of market research (including both my last failed startup and my last employer), but I've yet to see one get anything useful out of it.
There're a couple of pitfalls to be wary of when doing market research, like:
1.) Confirmation bias. At my last employer, we had an intern spend all summer calling prospective customers. He called 30-40 organizations and got through to a grand total of 2 executives, who were sorta lukewarm about the idea. Then my boss said, "Well, I think there's enough interest to move forwards with this project." Then we busted our ass for a year, put it in front of a bunch of other customers, incorporated their feedback, and it still didn't sell.
2.) Not having something for people to react to. People don't know what they want, but if you show them something, they can often tell you whether they like it or not, and possibly suggest things they do want.
3.) Calling the wrong people. It doesn't help to get the input of people who won't use your product anyway. This can be kinda tricky though, since you often don't know who'll end up using your product ahead of time.
Sounds mostly like bad execution of a generally good idea.
I think that's it. It takes very little in the way of tangible resources to build software. The biggest thing people need is skill, and they tend to believe they're skilled even in the face of contradictory evidence.
for a lot of the consumer-facing software startups, founders releasing early is how they see if the idea is viable