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Advice like "validate your market," strategies for chicken-egg problems, or the first point (start from a beachhead).... These are not the same as "get a good accountant" or "incorporate this way." They're not hurdles to pass with good advice in specific detail.

These are problems that need clever & creative solutions, and the answers usually aren't do exactly what you are doing now and also this thing. AirBnB started around conferences, momentary and local spikes in demand that let them solve chicken-eggs one user at a time, face to face. This gave them a beachhead strategy, a hardcore users strategy, chicken-egg strategy, a way of validating.

The iphone "boiled an ocean." A thousand man years spent in secret. A big product launch, after which everything about that market changed. It's not an impossibility, boiling a metaphorical ocean. But, it's risky and mostly out of bounds to a startup. If a startup wanted to do this, they'd need to find a different path.

There's a common Henry Ford quote (apocryphal, whatever) about the pointlessness of asking people. They would have told him to make a faster horse, supposedly. You can skip market validation in some cases, with historic products like the iphone, model T, teleportation, cure for baldness or magic sex dust.

A lot of startup advice is about leveraging the strengths of being new and flexible. For an Amazon, Walmart or GM, they are locked in to most of what they do. Startups can adapt everything around a smart strategy.

This is good insight, and I upvoted you for it, but it doesn't really answer his question. Validating your market is business speak for making sure that you won't lose a ton of money at launch, assuming your execution isn't horrible.

All you have to do is to collect some amount of interest through something like a landing page. It won't guarantee runaway success, but it won't break the bank either.

It does exactly answer the question. It's just that the answer is not what most people expect: an algorithm. Some problems have simple solutions, or simple explanations. Other problems require deep consideration and almost philosophical shifts in one's mind. There is no algorithm for this problem. This requires creative process. Creative process is impossible to describe in a couple of sentences in a way that will be enough to teach it to someone.

This is a long way to say “people don’t know what you want until you give it to them”. See famous Henry Ford quote.

If ‘validate your market’ means ask people what they want - that’s bad. If it means show a small audience a prototype - that’s good.

Maybe the problem is in how the questions are being formulated.

Netflix isn’t “do you want internet movies?”. That’s the technology, not the service. Netflix is “do you want immediate access to any movie, from the comfort of your home and for and for a low price?”. That, I believe, would have been intriguing ten years ago. Especially after they ask “how low is the price?” and you respond “cheaper than going to the movies”; “per viewing?”; “per month. Unlimited viewings of every movie”. Now that would have gotten their attention.

Similarly, I didn’t want your Sony CLIÉ then and I don’t want it now. “Make this work with your finger instead of a stylus” and “simplify the UI” are too abstract. We didn’t know we wanted those until the iPhone showed what they are. Granted, you want to ask people before wasting resources making something, but the appeal of the iPhone isn’t just that it did those things better, but that those better interactions opened the door for things we hadn’t yet envisioned. The success of the iPhone is not the device, but what the device allows you to do.

You’re asking about the “what”. You need to instead ask about the “why”. Only then think about the “how” and “what”. I highly recommend Simon Sinek’s “how great leaders inspire action”[1] to explain what that means. He also has a book, but I’d say you can skip it. The video has the gist.

[1]: https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_insp...

Some questions I'd ask, off the top of my head:

Have you ever tried a touchscreen computer? Was it better than when you use a mouse? Why? Which interface do you prefer - your computer or your phone? Why? Show me how you would go to www.altavista.com on your PDA. It looked like it was hard to find the browser - is it often hard to find the right application on your PDA? When you bought this PDA, were there cheaper PDAs you could have bought? How much more did you spend on this PDA because it was better?

Do you have lots of VHS videos at home? When did you last watch one? Do you have a lot of DVDs? How are they stored? Is it a problem that you have them? Would you rather not have to store them, and why? Have you ever watched a YouTube video? Is it easier to find something on YouTube or to watch a DVD?

iPhone example; Apple had tons of experience selling iPods first. They had probably learned that users desired more functionality, they would pay for it. The iPod became a device people would carry everywhere. So it made sense to combine it with a phone, which people also wanted to carry everywhere. (The phone was the iPods biggest threat.) Now, how to design it is where you get to be creative and where Apple excelled. Also, I think them partnering with AT&T (I think) to ensure proper network availability helped them out. Otherwise, people would have just complained that it cost too much for data. This was already a big hindrance in the US market for any type of smart device. Point is, Apple through the iPod had a good idea that the iPhone would be a success if executed properly.

Netflix example; because of their DVD business, they knew users wanted on-demand. Mail was a bottleneck. So they had a pretty good idea their customers would see the benefit of streaming.

As you mentioned, new ideas are tougher because you can't learn from your existing customers. There's no simple answer, but you just have to formulate a strategy. Target a particular segment that "get's it". Take it one day at a time. Some things are only possible with enormous resources. If you can't find the resources, it's not possible and you should move on.