I built a product which had the following goals: 1) Free to consumers. 2) Paid plans for business to get access to leads generated by the above consumers ente

I built a product which had the following goals: 1) Free to consumers. 2) Paid plans for business to get access to leads generated by the above consumers entering their data. The problem was that I did all my upfront market validation with the first group, which jumped all over my product with comments like "I could totally use that!" and "wow what a great idea!" type feedback. I built the product for the consumers first and launched a private beta. Then when I turned to build the other side of it for the businesses, I found most of them didn't see the need for it, and it would take a high touch sales process to get them onboard. At least until the product became a household name and had millions of users. I quickly realized that I had run into what I've since deemed "the Groupon Problem". The only way to make the business work would be to pour in tons of capital to hit really high user numbers while paying for a high touch sales process. I had envisioned being able to run the whole thing as a bootstrapped business. When I realized it couldn't possibly work that way, I scrapped it. I learned a ton though, and now I'm just waiting for another great idea to really execute on.