Sometimes I wonder about what exactly is the line when it comes to listening to customers or looking at your competitors, for ideas? As the Hiten Shah puts it

Sometimes I wonder about what exactly is the line when it comes to listening to customers or looking at your competitors, for ideas? As the Hiten Shah puts it he got ideas or Hiten Bombs by watching competitors, investors, advisers and some which he thought of himself. And he also notes later in the article, they saw Mixpanel doing mobile apps, they saw the freemium option etc. So, the feature generation process was correct. What went wrong was Kissmetric's estimation of the success of different ideas. They decided to pass on building mobile apps or giving freemium because they thought it would cost them too much. The question is - What kind of intuition was at play to make those decisions? IMO there aren't many ways to intuitively know when something will work or not.