We took similar actions at my recently failed startup, which headed on a slow, downward path. I identified an apparent pain in our target market based on past conversations with friends working in that space. My team and I felt we validated the pain because we kept hearing about it in our face-to-face interviews with potential users & buyers. One interviewee even went into mild theatrics half way through his interview, "Stop! This keeps us up at night because we ..." That was just the beginning of his 10 minute proclamation that the problem was worth solving, and that they'd pay a decent amount for the solution. Exactly how he said it.
We developed what we thought and what our potential customers claimed was a solution to an unmitigated problem in a very sensitive financial process. We followed startup advice and made it clear that we would charge for the solution. Fast forward a few months: usage dropped from supercharged to minimal then to nothing. Most of the customers we worked so hard to acquire went back to their old ways. When we did followup calls, their newer recruits were none the wiser that we even built something specifically for them. Clearly, the problem wasn't that important in the grand scheme of things.
