1. Didn't build something people would pay for
2. Beaten by the competition
3. Didn't build something people would pay for
4. Didn't build something people would pay for
5. ?
6. Didn't know their users and build the product with them in mind
7. Didn't build something people would pay for
I'm one of the founders from #7 (EventVue) and we had paying customers from the beginning. We had people who would pay, just not enough money and not frequently enough.
We probably would have tried that if money was the only objection for event organizers. They had enough other concerns (like giving up access to their attendee list) that made customer adoption of our product tough.
Tumblr's also got a lot of additional "social" features (e.g, reblogging content and tracking it across blogs) which I don't think Vox had, though. I'm not sure how instrumental those features have been in Tumblr's success, but I'm sure they haven't hurt.
One might think asking people what value they would get would be a good idea - making sure there is in fact some audience that would pay. There are a lot of really cool things I'd like to have, but that doesn't mean I'd pay for all of them.
I wonder to what degree a service like KickStarter can be used to determine if people will in fact pay for a product like one of these?
I think people are pretty bad at predicting value in advance. I suspect you'd get plenty of bad data. If you don't understand the market you're building your solution for, in any case, I think you have a bigger problem. I'd also feel uncomfortable publishing my idea before building it because of competition. This is why I'd rather go something like the MVP route and only then solicit feedback. But then most of my ideas involve building a community, where first mover advantages can be very important.
Yes: it's harder than people think to divine what people will pay for and what they won't.
As a consumer, I pay for plenty of things I wouldn't necessarily have predicted I would; conversely, I use some "successful" services that I'll never pay a dime for.
Yeah it is hard for the founders to know what people will pay for ahead of time. In a few cases there they had free competition, although that may have sprung up after they started. If you have free competition and are looking for direct payments from users as a model you have to think you can build a much better product than the free alternative.
Something like Twitter I think is a great example of people probably not knowing they wanted it until they used it and it built up a bit. Sure they are ad supported, but Twitter could have very easily fit into the type of stories in this post had things went a little differently.
