Man, diligence sure does pay.  Ask me, I just lived it first hand.

I have been working on my next startup (#5, but who is counting?), and we are vetting through a number of ideas and aspects of the new company's offerings.  So true to my own writings, I was out in the marketplace meeting with potential customers.  We asked a lot of questions around the idea we had, trying to find "market pain" to sell against.  What did we hear?  Nothing.  Crickets.  Silence.  We took the questioning down another path, working different aspects of the business and product concept.  Again, nothing but crickets.  A call to a second prospective customer yielded identical results.  Ouch.

As much as the White House likes to deny it, we're in a recession.  As an entrepreneur, perhaps you are asking, "is a recession a good time to start a business?" My vote is yes!

The way I see it, any time is a good time to start a company.  Some times may be better than others, but it is all a matter of degree.  Once bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, postponing doing your startup is a very, very hard thing to do.  It's like when you have both arms full of, say, groceries, and you get a wicked itch on your leg.  The more you think about it, the more it itches.  It only gets worse, never better.  Sooner or later you need to put the bags down and scratch the itch.  Same with a startup - the itch only gets worse the more you think about it.  Caught in bureaucratic meetings?  Itch.  Watching your peers build companies?  Itch itch.  Thinking, no knowing, that you have what it takes to build a great company.  Itch!

Almost every time I see a series of business plans, a few of them stand out as more features than products.  Features are nice, but products make companies.

So you have a business idea, and you're building a business plan.  But you keep struggling on how people are going to find, buy, and use what you have created.  Perhaps the issue is not with your business smarts or knowledge of marketing... perhaps you have a feature and not a product.  Features are almost always neat, clever, unique, and impressive.  But a business needs more than a "neat" factor, it needs the ability to engage customers and earn revenues.