Ok, so I'm trying to be a bit clever with my title here but wanted to put a post out there about the difference between the technical innovation that powers a product and the workflow that product enables.  Cool technology for the sake of cool technology is great and all but in order for it to be worthy of paying for it must serve some functional need – established, in need of optimization, or newly created.

My first start up was a company called Idapta.  We had really cool technology built by some super smart people.  The only problem was that we were building for a market that had yet to materialize (everyone remembers the build it and they will come strategy around B2B marketplaces, right?).  As we tried to pivot into the world of supply chain management, we were woefully unprepared both functionally and institutionally to address the core workflow needs at the process level and the underlying legacy technology.

My point is that it is definitely important to push the window of innovation and build great new products but that has to be mapped back to the demand profile of your market.  There is either pent up or realized demand awaiting your clever new widget or latent (yet to be realized) need requiring you to spend time, money, and energy elevating that pain to the point of need for a solution.  Needless to say, the latter option is super expensive and can be a "long hard slog."

Are you building with the workflow of your target user in mind or just building what you want to?  What do your target customers/users currently use to do what you want them to do with your product?  Nothing?  Then you are going to be elevating pain.  Ridiculously inefficient process or manual workaround?  Then you are on to something.