How to Reduce the Risk of Building a Digital Product
The failure rate for digital products is high but it isn't random. Here's how to systematically address the biggest risks before they cost you serious money.
The failure rate for new digital products is brutal. Between 80% and 95% of new products fail in their first year. For startups specifically, the number hovers around 90%. Those statistics should terrify anyone thinking about building a digital product. And they do — which is why so many good ideas never get built, and so many built ideas never get finished. But here's the thing: failure isn't random, and it's not inevitable. The highest risk failure mode is entirely preventable. And the cost of prevention is so low that there's no longer any rational excuse for building without it. The single biggest risk: building something nobody wants According to CB Insights, which analysed over 100 startup post mortems, 42% of startups fail because there was no market need for their product. Nearly…