I dropped over 40 grand when I could have spent $100

"I found this out by spending $100"

"The target audience for Rewire Attire, the high end fashion marketplace, was women with enough money to afford high end fashion and that are young enough"

Not so fast. Forgetting even the small sample size and methodology I'm wondering whether the OP did any other research at all? And "sharing measurements" is only 1 factor in making this business a success.

Additionally no reason that they couldn't have forked/morphed/pivoted the model built to some other group (say the men who buy custom made suits for thousands - not saying that would or would not work but even if OP is correct about the market info (and I don't think enough research was done to prove out the point anyway) it could work in another group.)

I believe we all make this mistake, event outside of startups. Think way back to middle school when you had a crush on that girl or guy and everything seemed perfect, and you were in love, but they didn't know it yet. All the signs were pointing to, Go for it! But you still waited months and months developing in your mind a perfect moment where you would ask them out, and they would say, "Yes!! I've been waiting for you to ask me forever!!" Then, you finally get enough courage to ask the question, just to get shut down.

A 10% positive response is often enough to ignore the other 90%. It's something we're all working on.

It starts at 10 cents a response I think, so at most he got 1000.

I do agree though if you're right, that is incredibly insignificant data.

It should be noted that while the screenshot shows only 17 responses, the actual survey* has 899 responses. Looks like only 17 responses fit the filters on the sample set.

http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/view?survey=b...

If you click on the google survey results image he links to the results where you can look at the male segment as well.