I did a text search for "fail fast" and nobody seems to have said it in the discussion below yet, and I would be shocked if you hadn't heard that buzzword before, but it means nothing more than this: your business idea is a sort of hypothesis, and you want to test your hypothesis as quickly and cheaply as possible. You would actually prefer to fail today if you could, so that you could be over and done with this and you could move on to the next thing and not waste any more time and money. "If it's a bad idea, you want to know it's a bad idea. If it's a good idea, you want to know it's a good idea."

When I was a young silly lad I sunk a bit of time and money into a "startup." I had pretty much exactly the same attitude that if I just put more of my own energy into it I couldn't possibly fail. Unfortunately success or failure of a given idea is a function of market conditions at the time. The market has an unlimited capacity to absorb your energy and money and time.