Perhaps the most frustrating part of building new products or innovating in general is that you’re almost never right when you start. No matter how much analysis you do before you start, how confident you are, you’re still almost always wrong about most things.
Almost all great breakthrough products succeeded after they failed – often many times. With ideas, like genes, the mutations themselves become dominant in success. It is because the strong mutations naturally survive and the weak one don’t that organisms survive over long periods of time. So too with ideas.
Perhaps the logical conclusion of this is that winners are often defined by luck, persistence and adaptability – not the brilliance of their initial ideas.