3 ms·
How would you go about validating a product at such an early stage though? For example, what could have told you that no one had an interest in an API like Zest
by montenegrohugo 8y ago
How would you go about validating a product at such an early stage though? For example, what could have told you that no one had an interest in an API like Zestful?
EDIT: There is actually an extremely similar service that does have a business use case: https://dialogflow.com/ https://dialogflow.com/ (from your past employer)
Does exactly the same thing, take a short input of words and identify overall intent as well as entities (in your case ingredient, amount, format, etc...)
On top of that, it has a great UI, export functions, integrates with other services, has an API, etc...
- mtlynch 8y ago>How would you go about validating a product at such an early stage though? For example, what could have told you that no one had an interest in an API like Zestful? I wrote a blog post last year[0] about what I think I should have done differently to validate it sooner but the tl;dr was that I think I could have pitched it to potential customers before I built anything. I imagine a lot of them could have told me off the bat that they wouldn't be interested. But even if I didn't do that, I spent way too long making a demo site even though the API marketplace I was using had its own (I just didn't like theirs). >There is actually an extremely similar service that does have a business use case: https://dialogflow.com/ https://dialogflow.com/ (from your past employer) I've never tried DialogFlow for recipe ingredients, but I'd be very surprised if it could match Zestful in accuracy. I'm using NLP too, but recipe ingredients are so niche and specialized. But their business is general-purpose NLP. I couldn't achieve that and I definitely wouldn't be able to compete with Google on that battlefield. [0]: https://mtlynch.io/shipping-too-late/ https://mtlynch.io/shipping-too-late/