The prospect of pivoting down the line can encourage entrepreneurs to pursue a passion to build without evaluating their hypotheses up front

But successful ventures don't just dive into a single direction, confident that if they're wrong they can drastically change course. The reality is that a single concept is a collection of variables expressed as a whole. Some are core to the vision, while others are educated guesses.

Sketching or mocking up experiential prototypes and then testing them with consumers or potential partners, while also explicitly jotting down your operating and business assumptions and using them to discuss the business with industry experts, allows you both to pick a promising route to invest in the development sprint and to pivot with confidence.

This market is a now a $2.1 billion business in the U.S., with online dating services soaring in popularity since 2001 and representing 53% of the market's value.

expected to grow only 7.5% this year as the U.S. market becomes saturated with 1,500+ sites and free dating sites and competition from popular social networking sites attracts cost-conscious singles

Europe is the next untapped market.

online dating is worth more than one billion dollars per year, with the mobile phone dating market worth $550 million