This has been my perspective. It surprises me how many people (including non-technical people) have a problem with simply going “hey I’m working on solving this

This has been my perspective. It surprises me how many people (including non-technical people) have a problem with simply going “hey I’m working on solving this problem. Would you be interested in giving me some feedback?”. Or even the less forthcoming and more morally ambiguous pretend that the product exists/is being built. don’t build anything yet. seek idea feedback from potential users. maybe even grow the community first. only actually build the product once you have enough data to show that people actually want it. invite the most vocal people to use it first. when ready to launch, launch with actual users on day one I’ve worked with “seasoned” business experts, MBA’s who run multimillion dollar companies themselves, etc, who had a problem with this just out of principal. I once put up a website for a personal startup project with a “give us your email and we’ll send you the white paper” form — and the white paper didn’t exist (although the raw data that would be used to produce the paper did). When one of my mentors who was examining the website wanted to see the white paper, and I said “it doesn’t exist (yet), I just want people to show me that they are interested in it, otherwise this project is not really solving a big enough problem. So far nobody has requested to see it.”... they were LIVID. They could never trust me again after that, even after I tried to explain the reasoning. So what if the first person asks for it and it takes a day or two to arrive? If only one person ever asks for it, it’s not a big enough problem anyway. But the mentor was seeing it from the perspective of how it would look if they did that in their multi-million-dollar company with their fortune 100 clients. But their rules did not apply for my situation. My situation was that I don’t even have a profitable company with customers. That I want to build things that people want, and the sooner I can figure out it’s not worth pursuing, the sooner I can move on to other ventures. So if during this journey I create a white-paper request button, and nobody ever clicks it, did it even exist?