Time to market as a predictor of success

Over the years I've been privileged to work on many new products. Some have been quite successful while others have been....well, not so much.

I recently realized that I can't name a single project I'd consider a success that took more than 1 week to develop into a functional prototype.

For the purpose of this thought exercise, "success" means it went on to generate more than $1 million in revenue or attracted at least 1 million users.

So, I'm able to think of 9 things that meet the criteria above and 100% of them, a full 9/9, were prototyped in about a week. Just to clarify, they all required continued support and development but I could touch and feel each one in 7 days.

I have tried many projects that took longer for the first pass. Some were very ambitious with development schedules of 6 months or more. I just added up 10 such projects and stopped counting because these are painful memories. I literally don't have a single one that managed $250K in revenue or 250K users, let alone the criteria listed above.

I think there is a lesson here.

-Jeff