I had a startup about a year ago whose "product" was collecting the career wisdom of alums 5-10 years out and sharing it with undergrads so that they didn't have to make the same mistakes that everyone else did. All of the alums, professors, and mentors we talked to about loved the idea, and were more than willing to share their wisdom. We built it, we collected stories, we launched...and students derived basically zero value from it. The problem was that without actually being in the situation that lead to those mistakes, they were unable to contextualize the advice: it was all just random words, good in theory but not interesting or actionable. Some things can only be learned by experience.
Ironically, though this meant the death of the startup, it actually served its intended purpose for me and my cofounder - the experience of actually doing the market research, building it, responding to feedback, and launching taught us a lot about what we wanted out of our careers, what we were good at, and what would be a blind alley.
I suspect that finding product/market fit is similar. I know about 8-10 people who have successfully built a startup. In all cases but one, they spent at least a year, usually 18-24 months floundering around without any idea what they were doing. These were not uninformed people - they had all read Hacker News, Lean Startup, every blog post and Paul Graham article they could get their hands on, etc, and in most cases had worked for or even founded startups before. In my case, we actually did the 100+ or so customer interviews, we got great initial feedback, we put mocks of our preliminary product designs in front of prospective users and got "Oh yeah, we'd definitely use that, let us know as soon as it's done!", and still got no users once we built it.
It just takes 18-24 months to develop the kind of deep knowledge necessary to build something innovative. That's working full-time and assuming you take all the shortcuts available to you. And that's time to the point where you have a viable idea - on top of that, it's usually 3-6 months to build out a prototype, and unless you've gotten very lucky with social connections, that's the beginning point of where you might viably get seed funded. Profitability is usually 2-3 years beyond that.
Budget accordingly, and don't get discouraged when you're a year in and don't have a clue what you're doing.
I want to start a blog with them sometime, but I've been pretty focused on my next venture, so it's taken a back seat. Maybe once I'm not in the "building a product is so much damn work and I'm not sure I've got all the details ironed out" phase.
I did do a blog for my first startup, which is a little dated now (2007-2008), but may still be of interest, and better yet, has already been written down:
With cofounders, it's very difficult to be remote, because you have to make very complex decisions, often under a lot of pressure. My cofounder was in SF and I was in Silicon Valley and that commute was already killer; if we were in different metro areas I doubt it would've worked. Being able to get together at one of our apartments to hash out some product design or go over notes from customer interviews was critical.
For customer interviews - they can be (and often have to be, if your target customer base is spread out) remote. Most of ours were over the phone, with a few over email/Skype and a few meetings in person whenever they were local. You get more information out of an in-person meeting, though, since you can gauge their body language and emotional state. Indeed, I think we would've learned the problems in our idea faster had we done more in-person interviews: we had the contradictory data where the students we interviewed in person often seemed lukewarm or disinterested while the ones we interviewed remotely were very enthusiastic.
The issue with in-person customer interviews done by the founders themselves is that VERY few people will be honest enough with the founders to tell them their idea sucks.
While there is obviously value in in-person interactions, I would strongly recommend balancing it with some online interactions as well. People tend to be MUCH more honest about your idea if they know there is distance and a level of anonymity between you and them (see also: Show HN :-)
(Source: Worked in market research industry doing customer interviews and qualitative research for almost 15 years)
That was something we noticed (eventually) as well. The presence of a founder who was clearly keen on doing something about the problem would bias the respondent, so that things that they would normally shut out of their head (like getting a job) became easy to talk about. Once the founder goes away, they get shut out of their head again.
You can compensate for this somewhat by gauging emotional response - someone whose eyes shoot open while exclaiming "You can do that?!" and then tracking you down when you walk away is probably a much better prospect than someone who says "Oh, sure, I'd use that" in a level tone of voice. But for my latest venture, I've been using a combination of AdWords and going to meetups to validate the idea: each of them tells something that the other doesn't.
Not having the time/money to travel to meet customers in person and gauge their interest in ideas or products seems to be a lot bigger limiting factor in successful startup formation than not knowing how to code or other technical skillsets (such as design).
There's been a lot of criticism of the tech startup industry for focusing on problems only young people in SF/NYC have, or that only engineers have, but actually going deep in an area we're not already familiar with seems logistically and financially impractical for most people.
The usual solution to that is to go deep into an area that you are familiar with. If you live in Minneapolis and work for a Fortune 500 headquarters, solve problems that big companies have. If you're in Nebraska and work on a farm, solve problems for agribusiness. Or in either case, solve problems for the customers of these companies. The tech skills to build a prototype can be learned on the Internet; for market knowledge, work with what you've got.
It was a huge pain and expense for us to have to fly to New England to launch & get real user feedback. (Our target users were students at liberal arts colleges, because we believed they needed the product more than CS majors at top Bay Area universities. Even so, we did some user-testing at Berkeley and Stanford, but discounted the results because "they weren't our target market".) It was less expensive than continuing to work on the product for another month would've been.
There is a reason why Facebook started at Harvard, SnapChat is in LA, and the AirBnB founders were shuttling to NYC every week during YC. They didn't have to stay there, but they made a big effort to be close to their early customers. Now imagine what someone who was a native of that area could accomplish if they went after local customers with the same energy.
Ironically, though this meant the death of the startup, it actually served its intended purpose for me and my cofounder - the experience of actually doing the market research, building it, responding to feedback, and launching taught us a lot about what we wanted out of our careers, what we were good at, and what would be a blind alley.
I suspect that finding product/market fit is similar. I know about 8-10 people who have successfully built a startup. In all cases but one, they spent at least a year, usually 18-24 months floundering around without any idea what they were doing. These were not uninformed people - they had all read Hacker News, Lean Startup, every blog post and Paul Graham article they could get their hands on, etc, and in most cases had worked for or even founded startups before. In my case, we actually did the 100+ or so customer interviews, we got great initial feedback, we put mocks of our preliminary product designs in front of prospective users and got "Oh yeah, we'd definitely use that, let us know as soon as it's done!", and still got no users once we built it.
It just takes 18-24 months to develop the kind of deep knowledge necessary to build something innovative. That's working full-time and assuming you take all the shortcuts available to you. And that's time to the point where you have a viable idea - on top of that, it's usually 3-6 months to build out a prototype, and unless you've gotten very lucky with social connections, that's the beginning point of where you might viably get seed funded. Profitability is usually 2-3 years beyond that.
Budget accordingly, and don't get discouraged when you're a year in and don't have a clue what you're doing.