Backwards Compatibility

One thing that makes new businesses successful is backwards compatibility. If your new thing can use a lot of already existing old things, it is much more likely to be useful to many people and take off.

But it occurs to me backwards compatibility has another advantage that I haven't seen mentioned:

Proof of concept.

Things that already exist are things that already survived the process of being brought into existence and they contain valuable information about what works and what doesn't.

I have read that up to HALF of all human babies conceived get miscarried in the first two weeks. The woman may have no idea she was ever pregnant. She has a late period that's unusually heavy and it may not occur to her she conceived a child and then fairly promptly miscarried.

The hypothesis is that most likely these babies are so defective they aren't viable. Mixing two sets of genes from two living people doesn't guarantee the results will be a genetically viable baby.

So if physical reality has that many failures, how much worse is the failure rate for people trying to turn ideas into reality by conceiving a business?

And this occurs to me because in the process of working on my "Elevator Pitch" website for my business idea I have realized it has backwards compatibility.

I simply took measurements and my mother sewed clothes for my sons based on their measurements and mailed us everything... I have multiple years of firsthand experience with this model working extremely well.

Taking measurements, sending them to someone far away and letting them make clothes and ship them to me worked before I ever owned a computer. It worked when I was writing it down on a piece of paper and mailing that piece of paper to my mother on another continent when I lived in Germany.

Ergo if you can find some means to make sure the measurements are correct, it potentially scales because at least that piece of it absolutely CAN work if the measurements are correct.