I wrote an article for .net magazine:
Ideas. They’re what millionaires, even billionaires, are made of, right? Imagine you could go back in time and tell your 2004-self to build and launch Facebook – you’d be a billionaire now for sure.
Except it doesn’t work like that at all.
Read it here: http://www.netmagazine.com/opinions/open-source-your-ideas
Your product is great, ‘best in class’, cutting edge.
Your customer service is exceptional, you’re a ‘customer-focused business’.
You have a strong technology roadmap, great features and killer developers working on it all.
There’s one thing that’s more important to the success or failure of a startup business than any of these things: let’s call it hustle.
By that I mean:
These things matter more.
At the end of the day, really: it’s all about hustle.
In planning a new project, I’ve found myself trying this ‘thought experiment’ virtually every day:
Imagine the (minimum viable) product was already built – What now?
It’s so easy to get caught up in the challenge of ‘The Build’ when really that’s just a part of the business.
If you want to build a business around a web/tech product, then there’s a whole load more you need to consider – beyond the product itself.