Didn't seek product/market fit quickly. A couple years ago, a friend and I started a real-time social shopping tool that we'd hoped to pitch to online retailer

Didn't seek product/market fit quickly. A couple years ago, a friend and I started a real-time social shopping tool that we'd hoped to pitch to online retailers. We spent months and months just building and building. We had a small team of developers working with us as well. It took us about 10 months to get our first prototype out only to find that no one wanted it -- not consumers nor retailers. By that point, morale had already started to drop, because everyone on the team thought we were just spinning our wheels and couldn't see any traction. Instead of spending another few months building in the dark, at that point, I mocked up something quickly in Photoshop and started pitching different ideas to retailers to see what people were interested in. I was amazed that retailers could understand what kind of product I was talking about just by seeing a mock and without actually having a demo or a prototype. After going back and forth on different design iterations, (I'm not a designer, so it was even more remarkable that potential customers could understand my mocks) we finally hit upon one that was of interest to many retailers. Although we piloted and signed with retailers, unfortunately, it was already too late. The sales cycle with retailers is quite slow, and many of the larger firms plan for their website a year in advance. So we would not have even gotten the data needed to prove out the success of our idea for at least another year. Speed to find product/market fit was something I completely did not understand then. I should have started circulating mocks on day 1.