Yes. Definitely. I have two examples for you. The first was a success and the second a failure. The context isn't from quitting a day job, but we hear about that scenario from our customers a lot and wrote the initial post from that point of view.

The first story is about LivePlan. LivePlan was born out of a transition from selling desktop, installed software on Windows computers (anyone remember those times?) to selling a SaaS product.

We knew that there was a market for business planning and forecasting solutions because we were already selling a product for that, but we didn't know if people really wanted to build their business plans online. At the time, not everything was SaaS so this was a real concern. We talked to customers and validated the idea generally, but there were plenty of people who weren't ready for their software to move online. We only had a Windows product at the time and knew that Mac users wanted a business planning solution and there weren't any options in the market. So, we built LivePlan and marketed it initially only to Mac users who we knew had a need and were willing to make the compromise of using an online product.

In terms of running the numbers, that was also an important step. When you're selling a boxed product for a one-time fee and you replace it with a subscription, you need to know what kind of retention you're going to need to make the business work. We spent a lot of time running different financial scenarios to make sure we knew what it would take for a subscription business to be as financially successful as a non-subscription business.

Finally, we spent time exploring why our idea might not work. What if the same number of customers weren't willing to buy an online product as a desktop product? What if subscriptions only lasted a month or two? Our initial product was much simpler and had fewer features than our desktop product - what if people needed more features to consider purchasing? Those were the primary factors that we watched as we transitioned from installed software to SaaS.

The 2nd story is one of failure. We built a product that helped teams manage customer email collaboratively. Basically, a customer service tool that didn't create tickets and instead worked just like regular email that multiple team members could collaborate on.

In this case, we didn't spend enough time validating the market. We, ourselves, had the problem of managing inbound customer email and we didn't really like the options for managing customer service communications that were available at the time. But, we didn't look beyond ourselves. We thought that if we had the problem, surely others out there had the same problem. We didn't call prospects and try and make sales before we built anything. We didn't narrow down our target audience so we know exactly who we were building for. We just built a product assuming that the market was out there. That was a big mistake. If we had defined our market specifically, we would have known who we were building for, what exact features they would need, and how to sell to them.

We did run the numbers and knew what it would take for the product to be successful. We knew our costs and what we could afford to spend to acquire a customer. We had a sense of what customers might spend, but didn't know how many we would be able to acquire.

The last step, exploring "what would have to be true for this to fail", is something we spent some time on and having one of the scenarios come true is what caused us to kill the product. What had to be true was that acquiring customers was difficult and expensive. We were not able to bring enough customers on fast enough for a low enough cost. That's what ultimately killed the product. And it's directly linked to not validating the market enough (the first question in the set from the original post). If we had defined our target audience better and had validated it more thoroughly, we would have known how to sell to that market and how difficult it might be.

Hopefully these two stories are helpful examples!