Over the past decade, I've started, been employed by, and advised a flock of startups. More recently, I've been an advisor at events like Startup Weekend, Lean Startup Machine, and the new Longhorn Startup Program at UT.

One of the big pushes in recent years - I suspect primarily due to Lean Startup - is customer interviews. At some point during these interviews, the "would" question comes up. Generally it's structured something like this:

"Would you like a product that makes X better?"

And every group celebrates that "95% of our customers said yes!"

That's great, right?  Well.. let's break this down a bit.

First of all, until they give you money, they're not a customer. That's it plain and simple.. so therefore, these are potential customers or potential users but not customers.

It's been months in the coming... but it's finally here:

WhyGoSolo is launched.

The bulk of the site was available at 2pm as planned but there were some issues in the last few hours... one developer was on the edge of sickness, our SVN repository was acting up, and our DNS was misbehaving, but we finally got the invites out just after 5pm EST.

The feedback has been fantastic. Some of the suggestions have already made it pretty high on the todo list. Some of the suggestions are more general on new Categories, etc.

There was one signup issue that was resolved in the first 30 minutes and we've since found another issue resolved later in the evening. Luckily, our initial invitations have gone to a very friendly and interested user base, so issues have been noted politely... even when it's annoyed someone. ;)

So if you haven't done so already, you might want to sign up for an invite!.