Great post...one of the more detailed post-mortems I've read...this one point stuck out to me:
> Most importantly, I can't relate to my target demographic at all
> I'm not a small business owner. I don't have any employees, I don't have any physical inventory.
> I think this was my biggest downfall. I had to pay for content because I didn't know what business owners with a physical inventory wanted to read about inventory management.
How is this not painfully obvious to any independent entrepreneur? If you don't have the resources to do customer surveys and advertisements, why don't you stick to something you actually know? Because, assuming you are a reasonable person, a problem you have is likely a problem that others have. The main advantage, in this case though, is that feature brainstorming and iteration is much quicker...sometimes the time intervals are as short as it takes for a thought to reach the other side of your brain. And even if you don't have a market right away...or ever...you may have built something that is useful enough to you to markedly improve your life. So, almost a win win.
I can't count the number of times when, while working at an incubator, I overheard developers building the next awesome photo-world-traveling-sharing app, and trying to come up with features they think photographers might need...it was always painful to listen to.
The flipside is that a lot of developers don't have enough hobbies to draw from with which to start a business. One thing we can all build is a developer-focused tool, but we are also some of the hardest customers to please, since we would only pay for something that is sufficiently difficult and useful that we wouldn't want to just build it ourselves or look for an open source solution.
This is something I have had to tell myself - go out and have a life as if you've already "made it", then when you find something you can fix that you yourself would prefer over the alternatives, that's your startup. Unfortunately, I think that means we have to be patient about ideas - you're not going to notice the real problems in a given area after having tried it once (unless your solution is a newbies guide or something).
> The flipside is that a lot of developers don't have enough hobbies to draw from with which to start a business.
This was (is?) definitely me. I have a grand total of three hobbies: Building software (also my job), playing WoW and reading.
I couldn't think of any business idea that I could build off of WoW (and I'm pretty sure Blizzard doesn't allow that), so I took a different route for finding a problem to solve:
I surfed through small business forums and picked the problem that most people were complaining about. That happened to be inventory management.
(I'm happy to say I've since quit WoW, on account of the nonexistent IRL returns).
> Most importantly, I can't relate to my target demographic at all
> I'm not a small business owner. I don't have any employees, I don't have any physical inventory.
> I think this was my biggest downfall. I had to pay for content because I didn't know what business owners with a physical inventory wanted to read about inventory management.
How is this not painfully obvious to any independent entrepreneur? If you don't have the resources to do customer surveys and advertisements, why don't you stick to something you actually know? Because, assuming you are a reasonable person, a problem you have is likely a problem that others have. The main advantage, in this case though, is that feature brainstorming and iteration is much quicker...sometimes the time intervals are as short as it takes for a thought to reach the other side of your brain. And even if you don't have a market right away...or ever...you may have built something that is useful enough to you to markedly improve your life. So, almost a win win.
I can't count the number of times when, while working at an incubator, I overheard developers building the next awesome photo-world-traveling-sharing app, and trying to come up with features they think photographers might need...it was always painful to listen to.