Couple months ago I came up with brilliant idea.
At least I thought it was brilliant.

Name of my new would be business venture was “Success Library”.
Assumption is simple. Many companies would like to offer library with business and self development books for their employees as a benefit.

But having a library is big hassle. Administration, choosing and ordering books, reminders etc.
We would take care of all this. We would select best business and self-development books and provide company with full bookshelf (app 170books) and take care of everything.

Library would be fully automatic with beacons, our mobile phone app etc.
We would have secondary business as book sellers.

With all this I went to couple companies to talk to people from HR departments.
They all loved the idea and told me to come back once we have prototype of library ready!

With this we started to work on technical solution. Ordering beacons, finding suppliers all over Asia, drafting app etc.
Fortunately I also started to investigate possibility to get to some start-up accelerator, which we didn’t do but in the process I was fortunate to have skype conversation with Peter from Startupbootcamp in London.
He recommended book called “The Mom Test” which is about interviewing your potential customers.
After reading the book I stopped working on “success library” idea as I realised couple things.

i) if people said they love the idea and we should come back they didn’t mean they will buy it
Everybody will be nice to you when you present your idea. They will promise anything as it doesn’t cost them a thing.

ii) there is no problem for solution we want to provide
Yes, having library is a hassle and they don’t like it.
But, they can live with it and are not willing to pay for something that would make their life easier.

iii) $30 for this book saved us like $10k that we didn’t invest into app development etc
Make sure you do your research properly and ask good questions.
That will help you stop before you fail and save you money and time that you can invest into something else.