This would have been a perfect fit for "sell before you build". If he would have secured a large order from a retailer and then put it in production, he would have been successful. Not securing a large order would have told him it just wasn't worth doing. I don't think the "sell before you build" method it is a good fit for all businesses though.
<p><pre><code> There was no doubt about it: I had discovered The Next Big
Thing. Like Edison and the lightbulb, like Gates and the
pc operating system
</code></pre>
Ouch.
<i>"Though I had a Stanford MBA and regularly consulted on multimillion-dollar projects, I didn’t know the first thing about starting a business."</i><p>That's a little scary.
Its always nice to read about how startups succeed, but maybe more can be learned from these postmortems.<p>I was thinking you almost want a dedicated site for these...
but could that be achieved by just having tags and filtering by tag on HN ?<p>Tags would help with a range of scenarios, such as if I'm only interested in Erlang posts by squid-farming bodybuilders, for example.