Great ideas are not the same as great businesses

We've all experienced that joyous feeling of waking up one morning thinking we finally have the product that will solve the mother of all problems. Hey, we even have a product name. We start working on the idea, develop a few prototypes, figure out the pricing and if we're really forward thinking we do a 12 month revenue forecast. And yet, somewhere between that point and the end of the 12 months, our juggernaut starts losing steam. A few weeks later we realise our productivity is dropping and what's worse, our enthusiasm is dropping too. After a few months of denial we finally accept defeat, put the project to sleep and move on. We call it experience and maybe one day we'll sit at the bar and begin telling the story of when we were entrepreneurs. I know cause it happened to me.
Years ago I was having coffee with the CEO of a charity and discussing their needs on the ground. Two hours later we had the bare bones of a new app that would help them solve their material donations problems using Web technology. 

My great business idea could've been called "The Titanic"

I discussed the idea with a developer friend of mine and he said the architecture and user interfaces would be relatively simple and we should have a prototype in a couple of weeks.Those of you in the tech startup space can already see where this is going. My great business idea could've been called "The Titanic" cause it was great and was already heading toward an iceberg within hours of being conceived.What went wrong? I had identified a real customer need. I had a real customer willing to pilot the project and support the roll out to their sister organisations worldwide. I had a technology expert as a partner willing to work for free to develop the product and still it died of death. Let's consider the failure factors:

1. Yes, I had identified a key pain point for the customer but problems are never that simple. What we sometimes  identify as a problem is often just one symptom of something bigger. Before you development start any work create a full list of customer jobs, pains and gains and validate it. Talk to other potential customers and learn if they experience similar issues and how much they would value a solution.
2. We started work on the application while designing the mock up and developing the documentation in tandem resulting in a mishmash of ugly interfaces with limited or no functionality and no way figuring out what was missing. I know that when you come up with the big idea, you want to rush and do as many things as possible to see the finished product before you as soon as possible. But if you rush you'll have no structure leaving the door open for all sorts of creeps. Scope creep and feature creeps that is. Also, you'll have no way of telling if you're making progress. Even if it is a small project, make sure to write down your requirements, features and deliverables and measure progress against them.
3. And talking about scope and feature creep, those were the final nails in our coffin. After a few meetings with the client they started talking about other type of functionality that was loosely related to what we were doing but that in their minds had become more important. Not wanting to lose the client we promised we would look into it and see how we could incorporate it to the existing solution. At the end of that meeting we had somehow implicitly agreed the project was over. The key learning was that you should not start any work without a proper document that details that work to be done and what is to be delivered at the end of it and that is agreed by all parties involved. Sounds basic but we forgot about it and paid the price.