Thanks very much for your insight Dimitri!

I certainly think you’re right to (implicitly) suggest that the market is far less amenable to change than are a startup’s team and core idea(s).

People can be (and often are) replaced and foundational ideas tend to undergo various permutations throughout a startup’s life cycle.

(Some, like Paul Graham, even suggest that as many as 70–100% of startups abandon their original ideas within the first 3 months of operating).

And as the CB Insights study to which I refer in this article notes, trying to sell a product for which insufficient demand exists is indeed the number one reason that startups fail.

At the same time, though, the existence of a hungry and booming market does not in-and-of-itself guarantee startup success (otherwise every new company that launches in today’s most popular markets would grow and scale with ease).

Building a successful business requires a solid product-market fit, and part of attaining this harmony involves coming up with, and gradually refining, an idea for a solution to a problem that customers need addressed.

In addition, the successful execution of that idea is dependent on a talented, dedicated, and supportive startup team that’s capable of designing a product that respects all the intricacies of the market in which it will be sold.

So, yes, the market is absolutely fundamental to a startup’s ability to survive, grow, and scale but it’s ultimately the people running that company that do the actual work of creating something that’s truly commensurate with market demands.