One of the hardest lessons I’ve learned as a product manager is that working hard does not validate a startup.
I’ve spent long hours building features, bringing in support from people who believed in the idea, and doing everything I could to make it succeed. But I’ve come to realise that none of it matters if I’m not solving a real problem that I can build a business with.
I’ve learned how easy it is to go all in too early. I committed to ideas before finding paying customers. I brought in collaborators and moved forward without fully understanding whether there were enough people that truly needed what we were making. We poured our passion into crafting the product and cared deeply about the design, but that didn’t turn it into something people were willing to pay for.
For a while, I believed that if we just kept building and improving, things would eventually fall into place. But hard work does not always lead to traction. If the problem is not important, the solution will not stick, no matter how much polish or care goes into it.
Built to Look the Part
Back in 2021 I co-founded a venue hire platform through Falmouth University’s Launchpad programme. My co-founder had industry experience in event organising, and I focused on product development and fast iteration. We shipped an MVP in 24 hours, onboarded 20+ venue partners and published 40+ listings within a few months, and continously improved the interface based on feedback from early users.
It felt like progress. We were signing up venues, shipping features, and showing momentum. Onboarding supply made the product look more tangible, both to us and to those around us. It gave the impression that we were gaining traction. With limited time in the incubator and funding to deploy, we felt the pressure to commit to a direction early and not not doing so made us feel exposed. But we struggled to find event organisers, and it was hard to validate whether the problem was real. That should have been a dead giveaway.
The event organisers we talked to were people we already knew. They were supportive, but we didn’t challenge them enough to actually test the idea. Some booked through the platform, which felt encouraging at the time, but didn’t come back. Eventually, we realised those initial bookings were more about goodwill than genuine need. And when we began speaking with organisers beyond our circle, they put it plainly:
“We already know these venues. Why would we pay to use this?”
These organisers weren’t struggling to find venues. Their real challenge was managing logistics more broadly, including catering, ticketing, vendor coordination, equipment, and scheduling. Our platform solved only one small and easy part of that workflow. It wasn’t useful enough on its own to become part of their process. As we looked more closely, it also became clear the market was much smaller than we had hoped for. There weren’t enough event organisers in Cornwall and Devon, and those who were active didn’t have the problem we were hoping for. The few bookings we did receive were also typically low value, often around £10 to £20 per hour, which meant our 10 percent commission model wasn’t generating meaningful revenue. Reaching the kind of scale needed to make it work wasn’t realistic at all.
Looking back, we were working hard on all the wrong things. Instead of building the product, we should have kept reaching out to different people to try to find a high value problem we could solve. The pressure to show progress during incubation, combined with the need to deploy funding quickly, made it tempting to commit early and move fast. But without real validation, all that effort became a missed opportunity. It was time and energy spent making something that looked promising instead of uncovering what was truly needed. The time and funding we used could have gone toward solving a real problem. If we had spent even one more day uncovering new problems, we might have found something worth building. It hurts to never knew how close we might have been.
The Signals Were Always There
At the time, it felt like we were doing the right things. We were building, improving, and talking to users. But we weren’t asking the questions that really mattered. We were persistent with the idea, rather than persistent in finding the right problem for the business.
The signs were all there, we just didn’t recognise them for what they were. We went all in on the solution when we should have still been testing whether the problem was worth solving.
I’ve since learned that persistence and hard work only matter when they’re focused in the right direction. It’s not about proving the idea is right, but about staying open, asking honest questions, and being willing to adjust when the signals aren’t strong. Is £10K MRR a realistic goal within the next 6 months? How many customers do I need to reach it?
If the problem doesn’t really matter to enough people, even a well-crafted product is unlikely to become a business.
