It seems that entrepreneurs these days are concerned with "building something awesome (to also make money)", and that's not what Steve Jobs did.
Only the successful ones. It's one thing to create a product that answers an existing need (and that may already have competition). It's quite another to create a product that people don't realize they need until they see it.
The classic example is the personal computer. Steve Wozniak tried and failed to interest HP (his employer at the time) in backing his personal project, a small, one-board computer that anyone could own. HP didn't see the potential, so Woz was allowed to carry the idea away from his employer and pursue it on his own.
As Jobs often said, it's the difference between evolutionary and revolutionary.
Don't get me wrong -- I personally never got along with Jobs and couldn't work with him, but in this respect, he was often proven right.
I agree with your point, but Woz and Jobs convinced both -- they convinced both financial backers and the public. I'm just saying it's possible, and such stories often accompany noteworthy technological breakthroughs.
Thats called "being a great entrepreneur". And yes I agree, few people share.
> So suggesting to bad entrepreneurs that their product is possibly failing because they haven't convinced people why they want it yet, is a bad idea.
When said this way, I don't see why it would be true. You don't give illiterate people different advice if they want to write a book: you tell them to read lots and lots of books. The fact that they can't, simply means that they can't, if-and-until they change themselves so they can.
Similarly, the fact that bad entrepreneurs can't convince people to want something, simply means they fail as entrepreneurs. They don't get a handicap lane to execute in; there's only one market. If they want to succeed, they don't need a crutch; they need to become better entrepreneurs.
In New York City alone, hundreds of horses died in the street every day, and the owners simply unhitched their carriages and left, resulting in streets clogged with horse corpses. Horses generated over a hundred tons of manure daily, which, combined with the dead horses, was a sanitation nightmare that led to typhoid, cholera, and dysentery.
I hear this misattributed quote so often on Hacker News that it makes my head spin. :-)
1 steve jobs :)
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