Most startups fail because nobody wanted what they built. A working prototype fixes that before you burn through your runway.
Jason Corbett
Founder, FELTLAB
The number one reason startups fail is building something nobody wants. CB Insights studied 111 post-mortems and "no market need" topped the list. Not running out of money. Not bad teams. Just building the wrong thing.
And yet most founders I talk to are still spending months on V1 before a single real user touches it.
Pitch decks are guesses. Fancy guesses with TAM slides and market maps, but still guesses. You can spend weeks on a deck that tells investors what you think the market wants. But it doesn't prove anything.
A working prototype does.
When someone can tap through your product, try the core flow, and tell you what's broken or missing, you learn more in 20 minutes than months of market research.
It's not surveys. It's not "would you use this?" conversations. People lie in those. Not on purpose. They just want to be nice.
Real validation is putting something functional in front of people and watching what they do. Do they finish the flow? Do they come back? Do they pay?
You don't need a full product to answer those questions. You need the core experience working well enough to test.
I build functional prototypes in 2-3 weeks. Not wireframes. Not clickable mockups. Real software with real data and real user flows.
AI tools have made this even faster. What used to take a small team two months, I can ship solo in weeks. The gap between "idea" and "testable product" has never been smaller.
That means you can validate before you hire. Before you raise. Before you commit to a roadmap based on assumptions.
I've seen startups spend $200k on a product that nobody wanted. Six months of development, a full team, and they could have learned the same lesson with a $15k prototype in three weeks.
The money hurts. But the time is worse. Six months of building the wrong thing is six months you can't get back.
If you're sitting on an idea, don't start with a pitch deck. Don't start with hiring. Start with something people can use.
Build the smallest version that tests your riskiest assumption. Put it in front of real users. Watch what happens.
That's how you avoid becoming a post-mortem statistic.
If you want to move fast, I can help.
If you're thinking about rapid prototyping, AI integration, or need to ship working software fast, let's talk about how a FELTLAB Sprint can help.
