Yeah, this is a good point and something I learned the first time round. Just because I (as a manager) had previously been willing to adopt bleeding edge tech

Yeah, this is a good point and something I learned the first time round. Just because I (as a manager) had previously been willing to adopt bleeding edge tech with no hoops to jump through to eradicate hundreds of man-hours, doesn't mean that the average customer is. If you're not representative of the typical customer/user, you need to find someone who is to use as a yardstick. It doesn't automatically mean you're headed in the complete wrong direction, but it does mean a lot of your initial assumptions (pricing, deal size, sales cycle, etc) are probably way-off.