The facts are sobering: the majority of small businesses fail within five years of starting up. While there are many reasons that businesses fail, including some that have nothing to do with an owner’s skills, it’s also possible that many of those same businesses collapsed simply because they couldn’t get enough customers to buy their product or service. In other words, the owners founded their business on a strategy of “build it and they will come” where, unfortunately, the customers never came. In fact, a recent study undertaken by the Blackbox seed accelerator found that many tech start-ups failed because they focused more on their product than on their potential customers. The good news is that there are a variety of ways you, as an entrepreneur, can conduct some market research to assess the potential demand for your product or service without spending a lot of money or hiring an expensive market research team. Read more.
