"How do you know what's useful? You've used the "saves time" metric a couple times here, but that isn't always enough. Bikes save time over walking, but people

"How do you know what's useful? You've used the "saves time" metric a couple times here, but that isn't always enough. Bikes save time over walking, but people still walk. Cars save time over bikes, but people still bike. Ditch-digging machines are orders of magnitude faster than human ditch diggers, but people still dig ditches. Buying fast food saves time over cooking, but people still cook. Netflix is more efficient than cable and Redbox, but people still buy cable and rent from Redbox. Quickbooks is more efficient than paper bookkeeping, but legions of small businesses still use paper. The examples go on forever. You can't know if your product is useful unless it's fundamentally obvious (lightbulbs, toaster, eyeglasses, cups, dog food) and most products aren't this way. Most are incremental improvements on stuff we've owned or done forever. Is your product a significant enough increment? That's where validation comes in..." Yes, but every one of the products you mentioned is successful and has created billions of dollars of wealth. Markets, like people, are complex, and rarely satisfied by a single solution. This is great news for new businesses that are afraid of competitors. But whatever you are attempting to sell has to be better on an important dimension by an order of magnitude. I agree that "better" can be subjective, but I do not believe that you are going to achieve success by switching from idea to idea, hoping to strike a chord with consumers. No successful innovations come about that way. You have to know what you are building and why. Marketing the product should be the easy part. Talking to customers to learn how to make those types of product innovations is a pointless endeavor. Let's stop pretending that it doesn't require some innate talents to build a compelling product. It is really hard and not many people can do it. Many people can learn to code and launch websites. This mismatch is why there are so many shitty products on the market that never make a profit.