It is probably a good idea to timebox contact detail searches.
Founder interviews: It depends on how difficult it is to find contact details for former founders.Customer development: Similar to customer discovery interviews.It may also help generate ideas about targeting to a different market segment, or any of the ten other pivots in Eric Reis' The Lean Startup. It may help generate ideas on the product side, such as in terms of feature set. This helps navigate a similar space, but with the benefit of the previous founders' experience. With this technique, you are aiming to construct a fuller picture of what's been tried in the past to identify potential landmines. You will be introducing the idea at a later time, which will be to your benefit, but it's likely that previous failures will provide you with useful feedback. The goal of this technique is to identify a unique way to angle a product, so that you avoid a previously committed error. If you are going to introduce something that’s “been tried before,” be clear in your own mind what’s different about it and why it will make a difference to your customer." Many near misses have two out of three values in a feature set combination correct (some just have too many features and it’s less a matter of changing features than deleting a few). Sean Murphy described it best: "Do research on what’s been tried and failed. How is this product different from similar products offered in the past?.Which features have to be included in the product?.What advice would founders of failed products similar to our idea (near misses) give us, if they were to go after the idea again?.What did customers like/not like about previously created products?.What related products have been created in the past?.
THE GRAVEYARD HOW TO
This technique involves exploring "near miss" failures similar to our product idea to generate ideas about what to test and how to build a business model that could work in a second attempt.