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Don’t waste your time building out the technology or product first. You’ll just end up with months of work down the drain, and nothing at all to show for it. W
by partingshots 8y ago
Don’t waste your time building out the technology or product first. You’ll just end up with months of work down the drain, and nothing at all to show for it.
What you need to do is sell the idea of your product first. Get guaranteed customers, which means, they need to put cold hard cash on the line. Putting out a survey to garner interest is fun to do, but you’ll never really know until you actually get a person to part with their money.
Once you have your first foundational customers, whether this be individual people or businesses, then start going 100% on the product itself.
- daleco 8y agoWould you mind developing a little bit? How would you sell the idea and get your customers first? I kind of get it, but it would be nice to have few examples.
- partingshots 8y agoIn quite literal terms: Sell a product/service to your prospective customers by telling them you have the product/service built. Of course don’t go all Theranos on them, and at least do some basic preliminary feasibility study to see what is actually realistically achievable. But aside from that, you’re pretty much good. Kickstarter is a great platform for achieving something like this of your thing is going to be consumer facing.
- ssivark 8y agoTo expand on that comment, the goal is to de-risk any expensive effort, by front loading on cheap effort that might help rule out the nightmare scenarios (like the process of making any big decision in life). Doing studies, talking to potential customers, finding a niche to open into, etc. follow in this paradigm. If anyone desires specific suggestions elaborating along these lines, the following book might be worth checking out: If you build it, will they come? By Rob Adams https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7876406-if-you-build-it-will-they-come https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7876406-if-you-build-it-...
- jryan49 8y agoI keep hearing this advice on HN, and I still don't believe it. Who is going to pay me for software that doesn't exist yet? Can you give me some real examples of this working? Also, how is this not literally fraud? edit: Do you mean you get them to commit to paying you when a product is ready?
- itronitron 8y agoIf you build your product on top of existing tech (i.e. open source stacks) then that removes a lot of risk for the client (assuming they are smart enough to even care about that). The trick then is doing this in such a way that you retain ownership, instead of it being a freelance thing. Companies are willing to do this because they get 100% input on the product direction.
- open-source-ux 8y agoI also don't believe it. In fact, I'd feel duped if I sign up with my email only to find out the product doesn't exist and the owner was simply soliciting interest. It's fine if you say upfront the product doesn't exist and offer users the option to register interest. It's not fine if you hide the fact the product doesn't exist. It's disappointing that so many programmers think this is ok. Here's an example of someone who created a UI concept that suddenly went viral, but which ultimately never got built. There was never any deception - everyone knew it was a concept piece but many expressed an interest seeing it built: https://www.vanschneider.com/story-dotmail https://www.vanschneider.com/story-dotmail
- sh87 8y agoI dont believe it either. I dont know of any successful product built that way. I can't imagine Apple building a landing page before the iPhone. Landing pages may serve a purpose but surely not to judge product market fit.