13 ms·
I got 400 signups with a video of a product that didn’t exist
- satvikpendem 6y agoThis is something I mentioned before as well (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18858703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18858703): I'm creating an open source todo list + calendar webapp (https://getartemis.app https://getartemis.app, source at https://github.com/satvikpendem/artemis https://github.com/satvikpendem/artemis) made by just me, and I can tell you how I approached the problem. The video you see on the front page does not exist in code, it is simply a prototype designed with Figma (https://figma.com https://figma.com) and animated with Principle (https://principleformac.com https://principleformac.com). I created the landing page and video, added a Mailchimp form, and I posted on Twitter, Reddit, and here on Hacker News, the communities in which it made sense. For me, it's a productivity / task management tool, so I would post on reddit.com/r/getdisciplined or reddit.com/r/productivity. It's all about creating a minimum viable product, as you might well be aware, but what you may not know is that an MVP need not have code. Indeed, it could be a video as I did, and I think for software, a video works best as people can actually see what it looks and feels like, without you necessarily creating the product architecture (full frontend and backend plus devops etc). Now I have over 150 subscribers (edit: now 1100 as of July 2020) in only a month due to rapid creation of this type of MVP, and based on this feedback, I changed my designs, and only now I am beginning to really create the heart of the product. Using non-code MVPs is the best way in my opinion to sell quickly before building.
- MereInterest 6y agoI think I'd make a huge distinction between a reasonable demonstration, which may be a video, and a minimum viable product, which must have code associated with it. If it isn't functional, and could not be sold in its current state, then it isn't a viable product.
- satvikpendem 6y agoSure, I made clear they were just signing up for the mailing list, not the product itself. They're not paying customers but they're an audience I can sell to later. I expect only 10 percent will convert to the paid product, but that's better than 0%, when you have no audience.
- MereInterest 6y agoGot it, and that sounds perfectly reasonable. I'd describe it entirely differently from an MVP, but it is reasonable to make a demo to judge reactions and see where points of confusion are in how the product will work.
- satvikpendem 6y agoAs well, there are two large categories of MVPs, low fidelity and high fidelity (https://www.robotmascot.co.uk/18-types-of-minimum-viable-product/ https://www.robotmascot.co.uk/18-types-of-minimum-viable-pro...), and subtypes within that. What I did was a "fake door" MVP, as the article states. It is not necessarily intended for directly measuring sales but whether its worth my time to build it in the first place. Having over a thousand sign-ups now, it validates that I should indeed spend my time on it. Then, I would make a high fidelity one, a "one feature" MVP as the article calls it, which would cut the product down to its essence and see if it can still solve a specific problem, and whether people would still pay for only one feature. I am doing this now with a mobile app instead of web/desktop app as the reduced screen space forces me to think about the problem of time block productivity from its essence. Perhaps your definitions of MVP are different than others, which is perfectly fine. There are others I've seen over the years like simple, lovable, complete (products), and so on (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955085).
- MereInterest 6y agoYeah, I think we are arguing semantics. For me, not being an entrepreneur, the "viable product" portion of MVP seems like it is a useful distinction. In your original post, when you said that you had an MVP that just consisted of a video, I interpreted it as a form of fraud. (i.e. "I sold customers a product that doesn't exist, using a video to fool them.")
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Jetroid 6y agoWhy is the date set to 2077 in your video? Fallout fan?
- orliesaurus 6y agoReference to Cyberpunk 2077....maybe?
- satvikpendem 6y agoCorrect.
- ultrasounder 6y agoHi , I have Your GetArtemis App starred on GitHub. The question is how do You reach out to Your potential audience before You make a sale to them? Where do You find them and how do You convince them to Give out their email address? I am trying real hard to network over LinkedIn and I seem to get a measley 1% connection rate. Not at all scalable.
- satvikpendem 6y agoFirst, I have some questions for you that once I know the answers I can help you better. 1. What problem are you trying to solve? 2. Who has those problems? 3. Where exactly are they located, both physically or in cyberspace? Based on your conversation rate, you are probably doing a shotgun approach or not talking to the people you need to be. Second, based on these answers, do things that don't scale (http://paulgraham.com/ds.html http://paulgraham.com/ds.html). Actually talk to your customers and figure out what problems they have, and what solutions you can give them. In many user interviews, customers will try to give you solutions but that's not their job, their job is to identify their problems, yours is the job to fix them.
- dj_mc_merlin 6y agoGenuine question, why is your comment capitalized like this? I assume english is your first language since it seems naturally written, and it's likely not dictated because no program would correctly write "GetArtemis". So how did it end up like that? Weird autocorrect?
- throwvid19 6y agoThe conspiracy theorist in me says it's a way of signaling via the (bunk) neurolinguistic programming philosophy, which suggests that emphasizing certain words will evoke a desirable response. (Personal words like "you" and "your", as well as positive words like "give".) The theologian in me says this person writes about/to god frequently and thus treats words like "you" as a capitalized proper noun so frequently that it's autocorrected. The rationalist in me says English is not their first language and spends most of their time writing in their native language which may include different noun forms and so is habitual. And given some spacing and punctuation oddities, possibly an older person. My money is on the rational explanation.
- jfkebwjsbx 6y agoA UI prototype is not a product, much less a viable one.
- satvikpendem 6y agoSee the other commentors replying to my thread. MVP doesn't necessarily have to literally be a usable product, it just needs to validate a hypothesis.
- jfkebwjsbx 6y agoThe very definition of MVP means a viable product. It has nothing to do with an "hypothesis". Sorry, but you are misusing the term.
- satvikpendem 6y agoNo, I'm not. I've shown you examples of how I'm not, and of how words change meanings, and if you do not believe so, then there's nothing else I can say.
- ilaksh 6y agoI am pretty sure a lot of those people are going to be pissed off when they find out they bought a product that doesn't exist.
- satvikpendem 6y agoThey only signed up for an email list. However, even if they had paid, wouldn't this be the same thing as what Kickstarter does, except not on their platform? Hypothetically, one would offer pre-orders for a service that doesn't exist, then uses the money to make it exist. I don't see anything wrong with that.
- semy 6y agoExactly.
- ryanmccullagh 6y agoDepending on your business model, a sign up can be considered a conversion, or not. If you're selling a subscription service, a sign up would not be considered a conversion, in my view.
- xwdv 6y agoOk Dropbox. I get tired of these startups thinking they can just throw up videos of non-existent products and get signups as some kind of validation. Consumers patience will wear thin when they find pretty much every new startup pulls the same crap, until interest in new startups reaches all time lows and this strategy doesn’t work anymore. Then the only way to validate things will be the old fashioned way: take a risk and build shit up front. If it doesn’t sell that’s your problem, the consumer doesn’t care. Not everyone is entitled to cheap and easy validation. Don’t fake, just make.
- serf 6y ago>I get tired of these startups thinking they can just throw up videos of non-existent products and get signups as some kind of validation. me too. It triggered myself into pondering whether or not humanity will ever actually become less responsive to advertising as a whole simply because of previous experience -- but then I brushed the notion aside, figuring that advertisement psychology is more-or-less all-powerful.
- IanCal 6y ago> Consumers patience will wear thin Feels a little odd using a massively successful example from a decade ago, with it still being used as a technique with success to say patience will wear thin.
- xwdv 6y agoThat’s a decade ago when the technique was novel. Imagine a world where every new product you see may or may not exist, because validation tests are rampant. Until you’re actually using the product yourself you’ll never trust that it’s real.
- Permit 6y ago> I get tired of these startups thinking they can just throw up videos of non-existent products and get signups as some kind of validation. Why? I'd suggest they take it one step further: Offer discounted pre-orders and use that to measure if people are interested. The only way to be sure that someone is willing to pay for what you're building is to ask them to pay for it. > Then the only way to validate things will be the old fashioned way: take a risk and build shit up front. This is bad advice. You should never take on risk that you don't have to. A startup is full of anticipated and unanticipated risks, there is no reason to expose yourself to even more. For reference, we tried your approach at my first startup. We built something people found really cool but that no one wanted to pay for. We wasted eight months doing this. Our next product was launched with minimal tech investment (1-2 weeks of development) and accepted pre-orders. We made $x,xxx this way and things went very well. If we hadn't sold enough we would have refunded all of our pre-orders and chose to work on something that people actually wanted.
- TrackerFF 6y agoI'm sure that if your product is "hot" enough, and checks all the trendy boxes, a fake video / pitchbook will not only yield signups, but actual investor money.
- yummypaint 6y agoI can see the appeal of doing this, and for things like UI design it makes alot of sense, but it seems too easy to cross ethical lines. Theranos basically did this, though of course on a vastly larger scale and over a longer time period. In the beginning, it's easy to tell ones self that filling in the gaps will come naturally once funding and interest are available. when there are difficulties executing on promises, it creates a choice between perpetuating the dishonesty for a low cost, or coming clean for a much higher cost. As time goes on, the feedback continues until there is some kind of breaking point. If you're going to do this, you had better be damn sure you can deliver, and have some sort of pre-determined go/no-go points to prevent things from getting out of hand.
- yummypaint 6y agoHere is a relevant paragraph from investopedia: Proving that fraud has taken place requires the perpetrator to have committed specific acts. First, the perpetrator has to provide a false statement as a material fact. Second, the perpetrator had to have known that the statement was untrue. Third, the perpetrator had to have intended to deceive the victim. Fourth, the victim has to demonstrate that it relied on the false statement. And fifth, the victim had to have suffered damages as a result of acting on the intentionally false statement.
- semy 6y agoWell, we delivered and the people who signed up got invitation to the beta. This approach is everywhere but we forget somehow look at them differently. Look at the https://www.tesla.com/cybertruck https://www.tesla.com/cybertruck ... They even collect money, but we are not sure if the whole company Tesla will be here in 2 months. Can we trust that companies will show us only super functioning thing?
- phalox 6y agoIt's all in the way you communicate things... People should never feel fooled, but you can show them something that doesn't exist yet to start their imagination. But there are of course ethical lines. Here's an interesting read: https://www.mironov.com/lying/ https://www.mironov.com/lying/
- ElCampechano 6y agoNew user submitting a post about a product nobody knows and it goes straight to the frontpage. I guess spam is now a necessary evil in HN.
- DougN7 6y agoHow is this title different from “I lied publicly and people believed me” ?
- semy 6y agoWell. I showed them the future tool and if they liked it, they could subscribe. If you call this a lie, then whole Tesla is a lie https://www.tesla.com/cybertruck https://www.tesla.com/cybertruck + I haven't collected any money from people. What would you say on Kickstarters? When they are just in "prototype" phase and they even not sure if they can deliver? And they are even collecting money.
- missedthecue 6y agoHow many has Elon Musk gotten with the same strategy?
- semy 6y agoAnd lot of people love him, lol...
- kaishiro 6y agoAlthough tangential to the point of the article, interestingly enough, this product does exist to some extent. A really talented developer that I used to work with has created a pretty neat Figma plugin to generate production ready ad banners on the fly (https://www.figmaticapp.com/bannerify https://www.figmaticapp.com/bannerify). I have no financial benefit to sharing this - just a fan of his work.
- est 6y ago> to do around 1500 banner ads. ... We got 6 products in 5 colors and the aim was to create ad banners for 3 countries. The goal was to create 15 formats of each banner ad Such product exists: Alibaba Luban. It was announced back in 2016 and here's a real world generated example of it: https://www.bilibili.com/read/cv59884/ https://www.bilibili.com/read/cv59884/ There's few demo GIFs show how text and picture align differently in position with different size of layout. Product page (in Chinese): https://luban.aliyun.com/ https://luban.aliyun.com/ some blogs https://www.alibabacloud.com/blog/alibaba-luban-ai-based-graphic-design-tool_594294 https://www.alibabacloud.com/blog/alibaba-luban-ai-based-gra... https://www.alibabacloud.com/blog/the-evolution-of-luban-in-designing-one-billion-images_596118 https://www.alibabacloud.com/blog/the-evolution-of-luban-in-...
- semy 6y agoThanks for sharing! In the past all graphic materials were done by graphic designers. In Photoshop, there is huge flexibility what you can do. Basically, you limit only yourself what you want to create. And the plugin leverage mostly this. If you see, Bannersnack basically do the same thing, problem is, that they don't have that reach functionalities as Photoshop has. Thanks for sharing anyway, good to know! :)
- emayljames 6y agoThe website for the plugin is full of spelling mistakes, bad grammar and has light gray text on white backgrounds in places.
- jitendrac 6y agoI know its very important to validate the Idea before starting the work, and such videos are great way to do that. But I strongly believe such videos must embed some sort of information like "Conceptual working of Future product" or "Video represents the basic concept of our targeted product". These types of info/notes will high likely give you the list of possible future buyer using the forms like "Add to wish-list","Be the first one to know when we release".
- semy 6y agoWhile I was posting this to the groups, I spoke to people and I told them the facts about that, if they asked. Nobody was pissed off, everybody was happy, that somebody was solving their pain.
- jitendrac 6y agoIn-person discussion is always a key to understand the client needs.They will surely be glad to discuss their problem because they are searching for some solution.
- blickentwapft 6y agoSilicon Valley normalises these sort of lies as ethical. It’s not lying, it’s “hustle”. There’s ways to present that aren’t outright deceptive. It’s a strange blog post because it’s not an admission to be proud of.
- gowld 6y agoIt's a valid concern but a weird to criticize it on a website that exists specifically as a marketing arm of a business dedicated to that purpose.
- irishgeoff4 6y agoI wish I could get those for our real site http://textita.com http://textita.com
- ilaksh 6y agoRight so that is called "lying". I mean it's the worst form. Normally people at least say it's "coming soon" or something. Rather than just falsely saying it exists.