Find Your Core Users First
CHARLES HUDSON: Startups ultimately succeed by building products and services that really fulfill known or unknown customer needs. Prior to a prototype, you can validate that you’re attacking a broad problem worth solving, but you can’t really validate that your specific solution will be the winner.
There are two questions you need to ask yourself as an entrepreneur before building a prototype. First, how are people currently solving the problem? Do customers have “hacks” that they’re using to get around the limitations of current solutions? For example, prior to cloud-storage solutions like Box and Dropbox, people emailed themselves files and carried thumb drives to have universal access to important files across multiple devices. Customer “hacks” that...