42% of startups fail because there was no market demand for their product or service in the first place. Why?

According to CB Insights, 42% of startups fail because there was no market demand for their product or service in the first place.

In a world awash with data and information, how can so many founders routinely launch things that people don't want?

Taking a concept and building a defensible commercial opportunity takes founding teams years of engaging with users, understanding market dynamics, and generating relationships with key partners in order to refine the business vehicle. Yet the evidence of their work is scattered across emails, word documents, text messages, and the backs of envelopes. These insights from customers, partners, and funders are the foundation on which business is built, but the tool sets to process them failed to advance beyond digitisation.

I would be interested to hear how you, the indie hacker community, go about spotting market opportunities and collating / processing evidence of demand.

The problems I have mentioned above are exactly the reason why I have built protolyst.org - a cloud-based collaboration tool for founders and their support network, bringing all the insights gathered through testing markets into one simple place to make building a venture simpler, faster, and more likely to succeed. If anyone would like to engage in some user testing with myself and the team, please reach out! :)