I wish you had read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. It stresses the fact of build a Mean Viable Product very early on and testing hypothesis like "will artists p

I wish you had read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. It stresses the fact of build a Mean Viable Product very early on and testing hypothesis like "will artists pay for this service" in a real life scenario with an ok product. Aardvark did this in a really cool way (check Aardvark out). Also, there is a notion amongst us entrepreneurs to persevere amongst all odds. This might be dangerous at times. There might be a massive market for your product yet you have approached it in the wrong way. The thing is, if you have no data, it is very difficult to know what REALLY went wrong. For example: Drew Houston from Dropbox early on stated that selling Dropbox through adwords was costing them something like 300 dollars per acquisition, once they introduced their double-sided referral scheme Dropbox started selling like mad. It was what Eric Ries calls a Pivot.