stokemoney

A lot of startup advice says to listen carefully to early users, but in practice the signals can be noisy.

For people here who changed direction early, what was the thing that made it obvious?

Was it weak retention, empty user interviews, bad conversion, inability to explain the value clearly, or something else?

I’m especially interested in signals that are easy to rationalize away at first.

I was researching the personal finance market and initially found only a few obvious companies.

After digging more, I found a much longer tail of startups I’d never heard of, including products that launched, got some attention, and then seem to have faded out.

Oddly, that made me more interested in the space, not less. It made me think that competition by itself isn’t the important signal. The more useful question is why so many attempts failed to differentiate.

Do people here look at the “graveyard” when evaluating an idea, or mostly the current winners?