I've been solving the wrong problem

My background is industrial engineering. So I am constantly ask myself, "How can I do this better, faster, cheaper?" I have spent the last 2 years concentrating on how to build products faster and better.

At first, I focused on how to create basic functionality faster. I became very successful at quickly creating functionality that worked but looked terrible and probably didn't provide a very good user experience.

Then I realized building terrible looking products faster, wasn't working. Starting at the beginning of this year, I started focusing on design and usability. I'm not saying that I became a world-class designer, but learned the basic ideas behind design. It allowed me to move from a terrible designer to an average designer. Plus, I can now have a conversation with designers and be discriminating about what they tell me.

However, I then found myself creating better looking and more usable products faster that solved problems nobody seems to have. I still wasn't seeing results equal to the effort exerted.

I ran across Eric Ries talking about how 9 out of 10 new ideas fail and the tremendous waste of talent and effort in this undertaking. He takes his cue from personal experience and a book called: The Four Steps of the Epiphany, which I started reading.

The point he brings up is most ventures fail because they don't find a product that people want before they run out of money. Or worse yet, they prematurely scale up and early adopter sales won't support the company and they collapse.

My new approach is to start exploring how to efficiently discover what I should be building. I had the good fortune to have discovered a product that hit square on with what customers wanted: online dating. We were extremely efficient at building out and marketing, but never had to wander around discovering what people wanted.

So last week I experimented with testing a product pitch against Facebook traffic. It took only a day and $50 to find some customer data.

I am focusing on finding a set of tactics that allow fast, cheap evaluation of ideas. I am confident that if I find a product that customers want, I can build that product and scale it. Been there, done that. Now I need to learn how to find that product without going crazy.