I'm confident that the bulk will have to do with a poorly executed customer discovery phase. 9/10 times, after some investigation / interviewing / research and

I'm confident that the bulk will have to do with a poorly executed customer discovery phase. 9/10 times, after some investigation / interviewing / research and your original concept turning into a basic MVP, you will realize that your original idea isn't going anywhere. At that point you either pivot, or often you start from scratch, on something completely different, something that the founders didn't sign up for. For many it's highly demotivational and perceived as a failure, at which point things just break apart. I know that everybody tells you that you should be sticking to your original vision, but often a vision that's not backed by thorough investigation doesn't go very far. Often you discover the vision has already been realized by someone else very adequately and you just hadn't done enough preparation. I think at the end of the day, as you embark on your startup journey, you have to all agree that it's ok if your original idea of providing accessible education to 3rd world children might suddenly one day turn into a dating site for foot fetishists. Perhaps that's a much bigger idea (the whole Derek Sivers's multipliers) and you can execute on it much better. Yeah, it's a real bummer that you moved away from that initial plan, but now you might be orders of magnitude more effective.