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> 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 th
by 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- xwdv 6y agoAs a consumer, you want startups to build stuff up front. That way you can immediately tell if they executed correctly and you want to spend money. Startups though don’t want to build shit. They want to pass on the risk of a failed product to the consumer. They’ll get consumers hopes up and then say “whoops, not enough people wanted this so we’re not building it too bad” This is also why even if you do build something people might not even use it until you reach a certain level of success because consumers don’t want to invest time and money into some product that can disappear overnight.
- volkk 6y agohonestly, i've stopped paying attention to products that startups fake launch. i'm sure im not the only one and also not the only one that's worked in the sphere and realizes just how poorly built/thought out everything is. moviepass is a prime example. your sign up pages that lead to nothing/nowhere because you got demotivated or too lazy or didn't find funding or the other plethora of reasons are exactly why i ignore them all and close out of the tab. your "secretive" coming soon pages are stuck in 2013. if this is a product that is serious/legitimate, then i'm sure i'll hear about it through friends, HN or TC or something. i'm starting to think that the "startup" field is mostly populated by people who do it just to put "CEO/Founder" in their linkedin bio.