> Before I wrote a single line of code I had spent a week talking to potential customers and even before that I had spent a week doing customer research and identifying potential ideas that I wanted to work on.<p>This sounds like a great approach to any startup / for-profit project that easily goes overlooked. However, I guess most people will still get stuck at this point:<p>> I had built a relationship with other open source projects so I knew where my early customers was going to be.<p>Background: I have an idea that I think might be interesting for large corporations with lots of retail customers, specifically mobile service providers, ISPs,... However, I don't know anyone at T-Mobile or similar, so I've been carrying the idea around for a long time. It'd probably be more of a consulting-style gig than a startup initially, since it'd need to be heavily tailored for each of those giant idiosyncratic businesses. Any thoughts or suggestions much appreciated.<p>Anyway, thanks for sharing, OP!