Failure due to not enough critical mass
For some thing to be successful, it needs critical mass. If a company doesn't get enough customers, it shall shut down. Same with websites and blogs, if they don't get visitors the creators or author loses interest or loses money for long enough they stop.
How do we derisk endeavours? How do you guarantee critical mass? To me this seems the most important issue for effecting change of the 21st century as it defines the nature of success
If you ask people what they want they shall tell you what they want but they might not pay for it. So you cannot rely on market research completely to get customers or users.
You need to pivot repeatedly to what the market requires.
Society seems to have settled on advertising as the key to getting people to use something and it's not the greatest use of technology.
Yeah, well, marketing, this necessary evil? Then, next Q will be: "How to market properly?"
If marketing is good and accurate and reliable and true it is not evil.
I don't think advertising is evil either. I would love to try new products and services but advertising is the wrong approach.
I feel we have an information problem in society. The right people are not hearing the answers. If I was an IT manager I would be interested in certain products of businesses but unless I actively search for them or marketed to I won't know what I want.
I'm using a hyperlocal chat room called Jodel but it's got bad things on it for my local area.
It's like a Twitter for a small geographic area.
I feel it shall fail if it doesn't get enough customers. And a different group of people shall try the local social network idea for the 2nd time and it won't work as it doesn't get enough users. Those developers time would hast been better used elsewhere.