I spent about a year and a half building a product that was impressive in many ways but ultimately got almost no users. The mistake we made was that we didn’t

I spent about a year and a half building a product that was impressive in many ways but ultimately got almost no users. The mistake we made was that we didn’t understand our target users well enough. I realized that we needed to spend a lot more time as “journalists” and “anthropologists” working to understand a certain group of people and their problems than as software developers building solutions. As I’m trying to find startup ideas these days, I find myself asking, “Which groups of users and which communities do I actually care about?” For me at least, that seems to be the engine that will sustain me over years of trying to build a company.