As someone who is experienced in tech, but not as much in business, it was interesting to see how many different opinions you can get about your business idea by talking to other founders, investors and business advisors. Just as some programmers may be very religious about using Ruby on Rails, or Python/Django vs. any other technology, many business people seem to be religious about one specific way of doing or growing a business.
So while not all feedback is useful, and while it’s not always clear what is the Right Way To Do It ™, we felt we have to take all of it as serious as possible, and get answers to all the questions people were asking us. And this was an extremely valuable thing to do.
Last week we went to Berlin, and were lucky to get incredibly high-level feedback from a wide range of talented people in the field. It seems that in the course of developing our product, we accumulated an immense amount of ideas and features that could be very important for our community market place in the long run. But the huge amount of features also meant we would need a lot of time to get validation from the market.
Talking with all those people helped us focus again. We need to go back and validate the main value for our customers and getting feedback from them right now. All those cool features have to wait until later. So we will start putting online the very first travel guides soon, and getting feedback as early as possible.
May the force be with us.
