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i've made this kind of argument time and again to myself, and as a result, made the mistake of building too much before establishing the market-readiness of the

i've made this kind of argument time and again to myself, and as a result, made the mistake of building too much before establishing the market-readiness of the idea. it's just too tempting to build first because you can "see the future" of the product, as opposed to the foggy marketing side of things. i've been harboring a nascent conjecture for a while that there is always a way to test a product without writing code. the only potential exception is for truly revolutionary technology that people simply have a hard time realistically imagining, but even that's debatable. the hard part is finding that _one_ key differentiating feature of your product and devising a very clever test to see if it's valuable without writing code. this is truly difficult, and is also the reason most of us feel like we can't test an idea before we build it (i fall for this fallacy over and over so have lots of experience now identifying it =)

dahart 9y ago
> it's just too tempting to build first because you can "see the future" of the product, as opposed to the foggy marketing side of things. Exactly! That's exactly what I did, and my mistake has given me a much greater appreciation for marketing. For me, getting to the right value proposition has been far harder than figuring out whether a market exists. Teller's got a pretty interesting point. I suspect your conjecture is right, that there is always a way to test without much engineering. Maybe these are two different answers to two different questions. It can be true that there's a market, and still have a product and execution that fails to tap that market. Teller's point is perhaps more about execution - he said that any given magic trick won't work until the performance is perfected. If you break the illusion on a practice version, the trick is a complete failure. I'm not sure, but maybe the analogy is that you can do market validation without engineering, and find that a market exists, but you still won't know if your idea will be a successful business until after it's a successful business.

dahart 9y ago

> it's just too tempting to build first because you can "see the future" of the product, as opposed to the foggy marketing side of things. Exactly! That's exactly what I did, and my mistake has given me a much greater appreciation for marketing. For me, getting to the right value proposition has been far harder than figuring out whether a market exists. Teller's got a pretty interesting point. I suspect your conjecture is right, that there is always a way to test without much engineering. Maybe these are two different answers to two different questions. It can be true that there's a market, and still have a product and execution that fails to tap that market. Teller's point is perhaps more about execution - he said that any given magic trick won't work until the performance is perfected. If you break the illusion on a practice version, the trick is a complete failure. I'm not sure, but maybe the analogy is that you can do market validation without engineering, and find that a market exists, but you still won't know if your idea will be a successful business until after it's a successful business.