I get annoyed with the "start quickly, fail early" philosophy. I think it can work in certain contexts - particularly consumer web, where the engineering is often quirky and superficial - but it just does not apply for real innovation based upon medium to long term software engineering, which is ultimately what pushes economic growth in the sector. The other point about this blog post: a 16 year old business studies student would point out, why didn't you do any market research? It's uncool, often pedantic and can become irrelevant quite quickly, but it should always be done, particularly if your putting so much effort into scaling the technology.
Quite true that market research is critical. However, the choice of potential markets to research is even more critical. One of the points I read frequently about successful startups is that the founders set out to solve some problem that they had: something that was interesting to them. Doing so gives you an inherent domain expertise - and internal motivator - you wouldn't have otherwise. For instance, I don't have any interest in having a home theater so working on software to control the different components of a home theater leaves me guessing, rather than knowing, what people with home theaters might want.
Couldn't agree more - the problem-fixing approach is fantastic for focus and motivation. My new startup follows this pattern, we're pre-commercial and the funders have got us to do market research in tandem with prototype development. I was a bit wary at first, wanting to jump into the problem fixing part with the engineer, but the more research I undertake, the more I realise that other people have also had the same problem, and tried to fix it; at least by knowing about these attempts we can save ourselves a lot of dead-ends in the problem fixing process.
