It's what you should aim for at the beginning of your start up journey, because there is one thing that is more important to stress than any other:
You really really should know more than everyone else about the market you've gone into.
People will be impressed by the passion you display (if you don't have passion: do something else), but you will go into meetings with people that are usually at least ten years your senior. When you get the meeting. Believe it or not you are usually the CEO/CTO/CIO/CFO etc etc (as well as low level designer/IT support/chief cold caller, but that's less fun to talk about) of your company, and so you need to engage with other companies at that level. The way to do this is that you need to be formidable in your knowledge of the market, its players, trends, history, trivia, and rumours. These people have business degrees or experience, and just like everyone else they know the stories of great entrepreneurs so they know you can replace them and will respect you for it. But they also know the ins and outs of their business well enough to quickly see if you're able to do this. If you can do this in a believable way you will make everything will be easier for yourself.
In danger of sounding a bit machiavellian, fear is a great way to make people work with you, and a good way of instilling it an early stage is exhaustive knowledge.
This might seem like it goes against the "ship fast and early" school, rather in my eyes it compliments it. It becomes: "Ship fast, ship early and know everything"
Your product might suck, but if it does something that no one else does, even if it's horrible, AND you can meet the CEO of another company, look them in the eye and bring some insightful analysis on some minute detail of the market, you're more likely to get the deal, on your premises.
This further illustrates why its easy to find a minute niche that will eventually grow to dominate at an early stage, since the smaller this niche is, the easier it will be to become formidable in the field. And if you're formidable in something that blows up a year later you're probably gonna have fun.
