Navigating Your Way to Startup Success

Chapter 4Failing to Ship—Again, what’s stopping you?

To ship is simply to offer your product or service in such a way so that customers can actually pay you. The difference between validating your idea and actually shipping may be smaller than you think. In the last chapter, we discussed ways to validate or test whether your idea is a good one. We did this with quantifiable methods that can prove up to 90 to 95% of the way that your idea is good. We did not get to 100%. To be 100% sure that your idea is good, you have to actually collect money from a customer. Real dollars in your pocket prove that your idea is good and viable. Your idea may not become as big as you want (see Chapter 6), but it is definitely viable. You know this because you ...