[aonsager]

This is a good point, and I think it also applies when chasing after product/market fit.

"Channel" is a concrete redefinition of the vague term "market" that describes an actual group of people plus the means of reaching them. "Offer" is a redefinition of "product" that includes a strategy for communicating its value. These are pretty important distinctions, and I agree with the author that this framework holds a lot of value.

The question remains, how and when do you decide that your product just doesn't have enough value to anyone you might pitch it to? Obviously you start your venture believing that it has value, and at any point your next iteration might reveal the magic combination. Or it might never come. I think there is no good solution, and it is, as you say, an art.

[mettamage]

> The question remains, how and when do you decide that your product just doesn't have enough value to anyone you might pitch it to?

I feel investors and traders can answer this to some extent. The framework I'd have as a trader, and to a lesser extent as an investor, is simply an expected value calculation.

I put x amount of time in with milestone a, b, c and d. I expect on average to make y amount of money, which means that I need to make p revenue on milestone a, q revenue on b and so on.

Obviously this is a super rough outline and one could do without the milestone idea and simply look at it as a 1000 hour investment hoping to make $20000 + growth potential, for example. If you didn't hit you target you quit.

I already hear some people say: but what if it took 1001 hours to hit the motherlode? Well, sure, but you can always ask the same with trading as well. What if the price would've gone up even more? Shouldn't you have hold your stocks/options? No you shouldn't. In general, that'll be an unstable psychological basis to operate from and the biggest mistake to make in trading/investing is to not stick to your initial strategy.

Anyway, there are probably more perspectives, but I think the trading/investing perspective has a framework of answering this question. For me personally, it answers it in a satisfactory way.

My only issue with it is that it's purely from a monetary perspective and it doesn't answer anything related to the emotions of a founder and how it deals with stopping after a 1000 hours when it turns out not enough revenue has been made. So the perspective does need to be augmented with a perspective that has a grasp of the emotional side of entrepreneurship.

Moreover, entrepreneurship offers following your own personal mission while solving problems in a way you want to solve them. It's the ultimate sandbox game in the "adult people world" when it comes to "having a job". So some entrepreneurs might even argue that it's not about money at all. In that case the trading/investment perspective offers little value, especially if you can fund your own endeavour.