Mike Karnj

> You are putting too much effort in your product, your focus should be on finding the right market fit for your idea

How is this not excellent advice? There are lots of stories of founders building first (sometimes for years, even), then finding out that there is no market for it (as it seems you have done). The people evaluating your product might have even just read your post and concluded that there's no market, a tarpit idea [0], from their own experiences.

I am assuming this [1] is your product, from looking at your profile and searching the name on IH. The comments are exactly as I've stated, and they apparently have visited your website too, so maybe your logs are not accurate, or they have an adblocker on.

> Hey, I checked out your website—looks great! Just wanted to share some honest feedback. I think you should hold off on going too deep into development right now. Instead, treat this as your MVP and focus first on getting real customers.

> This is a common trap many founders (myself included) fall into—building out the full product before validating if there's a real market fit. Get users, collect feedback, and then iterate. That’s the fastest and most efficient path forward.

If all you are doing is making apps, you have a hobby, but it is not guaranteed that you will have a business from it, so understand what it is you are optimizing for as the two require different actions to succeed.

[0] https://mikekarnj.com/posts/tarpit-ideas

[1]…

'startup tree' -- Neat idea for a weekend project.

It's hard for early employees not to be inspired by high-energy, inspirational organizations.

I feel startups should work into their biz-plans, the fact that greater than 50% of their early frontline force would want out, within 12 months even. Some of them competing too. 'Scratch an itch' often stems from environmental input.

I like the idea of hiring and nurturing early employees with these thoughts in mind: http://www.mikekarnj.com/blog/2011/10/03/creating-an-entrepreneurial-startup-culture/
You'd be lying to yourself if you think your employees would give their best to your gig alone, indefinitely.

FWIW, I tried to search HN for resources because it seems to me this type question (or something similar) has come up before (but with no real support from what I found: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2849930 ). I did find this article in the process and thought I would pass it along:

http://www.mikekarnj.com/blog/2009/12/21/new-york-startup-movement/

And the discussion that went with it, for whatever it's worth:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1008080

I know that's thin. I am only posting it because you seem to not be getting much response. Otherwise, I wouldn't waste your time.

Best of luck.

I'd add Dropbox alongside VMWare as a company that unlocked a huge "sleeper" market.

Fundamentally I don't think those are counterexamples to the product-market fit thesis. These are cases where the huge market does exist, but it's a hard and finicky market. Nobody's quite managed to hit it yet. In many cases this is because nobody quite understands it, or everyone underestimates how hard it is.

Another good article on this from 2012:

http://www.mikekarnj.com/blog/2012/11/05/reaching-the-startup-holy-grail-product-market-fit/

Another option is the concierge delivery method. This works for some ideas better than others. Eric Ries (and many others) go into greater details. Basically, you manually deliver the service. So, if you were a grocery delivery service, maybe you would find some potential customers and have them submit a Wufoo form with their grocery order and then you would fulfill it. Skillshare did this (http://www.mikekarnj.com/blog/2011/08/01/how-to-launch-your-startup-idea-for-less-than-5k/).

I'd also add:

harvest, carbonmade, blip.tv, boxee, college humor, clickable, 20x200, hello health, OMGPOP, seamless web, squarespace, stocktwits, vimeo, etc., etc., etc.

There's a good list here:

http://www.mikekarnj.com/blog/2009/12/21/new-york-startup-movement/