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Before even delving into development beyond the internal spikes, put together your business model! You should have a pretty good idea who (and how numerous) your customers are, how much they're willing to pay, and how to reach them. Once you have those, you have some revenue numbers. From there, you can extrapolate at least a rough outline of a business plan.

If you can't figure out who the customers are or what they'll pay or how to get them to pay, then maybe you're sitting on a nice open source project instead. Lack of a business objective doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, but maybe it means you shouldn't try to make a living from it.



After our first failed startup due to a lack of costumer interest we didn't even touch a text editor until 120 customer interviews. We wanted to be damn sure the problem we were attempting to solve was an actual problem.

During this search process we built out our business model canvas making the necessary changes along the way. Each week we focused on a certain section of the canvas and challenged those assumptions against what our customers were saying.




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