How long did it take before you realised your product wasn't viable?
to the end of our funds... and after that I also needed few months to figure out that.
Was there anything you could have done to salvage it?
I think I should listen more carefully my wife which had kept saying that we should have more validation. But I didn't listen to her, because I was sure, that my hard work will solve all problems!
I think If we would have more resources that would only make things worse... we would waste them also. There was one event which helped me a little bit with understanding how many mistakes we have made - some 2-days workshops for startups, where we had a chance to speak with our potential investors.
The interesting part is, that they didn't say anything about MVP, our other problem was scaling. If you are building a product for Polish market, then you are limiting your potential profit... and because in other neighbor countries Amazon is the lead bookstore, that would be very difficult to introduce our service into those countries.
But I started thinking again about MVP, when I realized that among 10 teams on workshops, there were only 2 teams (we and other guys), which had complete product. 3 teams had "just an idea", which they wanted to validate. I was surprise how much useful feedback they got without implementing single line of code.
Your last paragraph there. That will save so many people a lot of time. Who would have even thought of that..... great thing to learn though.