The Startup Therapy Couch™: The 85/15 Rule

How do you know if you're building a product or service or business that has the potential to be viable and long-lasting?

We use the 85/15 rule, which tells us that 15% of the people we interview for product-market-customer fit are going to be outliers. They'll have opinions that seem diversionary from the rest of the group or raise issues or questions that diverge from the bulk of the research.

You can build a business for the outliers, but it's much harder to make it viable and to make money doing that. Instead, we build for the 85%, solving problems for the majority of people so that we can maximize our target audience.

And I can't think of ANYTHING funny as a parting line for this one... :)