Exactly. Sometimes when you think your idea is good all you need is one or two other people to tell you they think its good and that's it: it's a good idea. How did Instagram come to the conclusion that their idea was a good idea? Or any other startup for that matter. If Zillionears turned out to be a success no one would have thought that having a few people say "good idea" in the beginning was insufficient to get started.
Yeup. Lots of arm-chair advice these days. It's a business all in itself. It's funny watching people compile lists of "all the mistakes" in hopes that not repeating a single one of them will equal success. Plenty of wildly successful businesses became so without having MVPs or setting up fake landing pages. They spent years building out real product-breakthroughs, maybe with even real technology/science. I'm willing to bet that for every rule that's broken in that StartUpGrave twitter list above (I haven't looked so I don't know what's really there, but I'm going on just the idea of compiling lists of mistakes), there's a company who succeeded while still failing the rule.
There's so much retro-active quarterbacking that goes on (especially in the VC-world) that says X company was success because they applied this-thing-I'm-just-now-naming as a rule. Even though, Apple has taught us things like you're users don't always know what they want or need.
I totally agree with that! There are tons of companies that "win the lottery", and build a product with no validation and succeed. It is obviously not the "right" way to do it, but sometimes it does work.
