Indeed building something you want, or that someone you know wants, is necessary, but not sufficient! I’d say it depends how much time you’re going to spend creating it and whether you have broader commercial ambitions at the outset.
If you’re creating something you’re going to use yourself anyway, that could well justify creating it (if it won’t take too long). Similarly if you’re creating it for someone else (as a favour, or who will pay you appropriately). Or if you can create a minimum viable product quickly to try out on people.
Also, particularly in the realm of short software projects, there’s a blurry line between creating something for fun/interest and doing so with serious commercial intentions, i.e. you could justify doing it speculatively without feeling you’d wasted your time if it goes nowhere.
But if you’re going to take months (or years) full-time creating something with a view to commercializing it, i.e. make a serious effort, it is remiss not to do basic research and evaluation first, to find out whether there really is a market for your thing (e.g. who customers would be, potential market size, what customers currently do instead, whether you can actually improve on that enough, how hard that might be, what customers would be prepared to spend), whether your thing should do what you think it should (i.e. its features, or indeed whether you’d be better off creating something else entirely), etc. It’s far cheaper to do basic research & planning than to spend months/years creating something speculatively and only then discover much/all of that was misguided.
explicitly without concern for how exactly you are going to commercialize. Indeed, most successful companies figure out where their margins come from quite late into their lifecycle.
The exact way you commercialize or get margins can of course change—but if you can’t figure out any way way of making it work on paper, the chances of it succeeding in real life are slim.
Indeed building something you want, or that someone you know wants, is necessary, but not sufficient! I’d say it depends how much time you’re going to spend creating it and whether you have broader commercial ambitions at the outset.
If you’re creating something you’re going to use yourself anyway, that could well justify creating it (if it won’t take too long). Similarly if you’re creating it for someone else (as a favour, or who will pay you appropriately). Or if you can create a minimum viable product quickly to try out on people.
Also, particularly in the realm of short software projects, there’s a blurry line between creating something for fun/interest and doing so with serious commercial intentions, i.e. you could justify doing it speculatively without feeling you’d wasted your time if it goes nowhere.
But if you’re going to take months (or years) full-time creating something with a view to commercializing it, i.e. make a serious effort, it is remiss not to do basic research and evaluation first, to find out whether there really is a market for your thing (e.g. who customers would be, potential market size, what customers currently do instead, whether you can actually improve on that enough, how hard that might be, what customers would be prepared to spend), whether your thing should do what you think it should (i.e. its features, or indeed whether you’d be better off creating something else entirely), etc. It’s far cheaper to do basic research & planning than to spend months/years creating something speculatively and only then discover much/all of that was misguided.
The exact way you commercialize or get margins can of course change—but if you can’t figure out any way way of making it work on paper, the chances of it succeeding in real life are slim.
(My LW article on this FWIW: Write a business plan already — LessWrong)