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Build all of them. One at a time. Until you win. You don't know which one is the best idea, so just pick one you most want to finish and build it. Market it.
by programminggeek 15y ago
Build all of them.
One at a time.
Until you win.
You don't know which one is the best idea, so just pick one you most want to finish and build it. Market it. And if it doesn't work pivot or move on to the next idea.
The way I look at it is you build ideas into products and sell those products. Always charge. That way it is relatively easy to turn a small, but meaningful profit. Then, keep building products until you find a "hit".
Even if you don't get to your home run you have some nice cash flow so you can keep doing what you love.
Think of yourself as a band. You love making and performing music. The first record might not be a hit but you keep making music until you come up with something that resonates. Your startup is a band. Keep cranking out albums until something resonates.
- aymeric 15y ago"Build all of them." I hear so many people saying "just build it". Do these people have so much time in their lives that what they build is irrelevant because they will have time to build everything anyway? Time is a precious resource to me and if I must build something, I'd rather increase my chances of success by picking the one people need more.
- prpon 15y agoThe difficult part is knowing what people need more. It's just an opinion until you find out for real. We all bring our own biases into what is essential/pain point for people. Until the rubber meets the road, you never know.
- Terry_B 15y agoYou can do a fair bit of work up front to get a pretty good idea though I think. At least about which of them don't stand a chance. People just don't like doing it, including me, because it's hard.
- prpon 15y agoI have gotten opinions both ways. People who do not want to critique an idea until they see something they can lay their hands on aka demo. And the other side where people who want to make sure the idea has market before they write a single line of code. I am not sure which one works. Being a coder and as someone who tends to code before evaluating, I would like to know specifics on how to do evaluation before execution.
- Terry_B 15y agoIf a prototype is trivial to build then absolutely. But I don't think there's ever an excuse for not going out and asking people who might have these problems some good questions. "Would you pay for this?" being one of them.
- peteforde 15y agoThis is only good advice if you don't care about potentially wasting years of your life. It's fine to fail, but don't set out to fail. Failure can be forgiven, but somewhere people got it into their heads that they should brag about it. Lots of people wore bellbottoms, too. Doesn't mean it was an idea for the ages.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- SeanWG 15y agoYou don't need to build all of them and could still see which one people would buy. You could make 5 websites with some decent SEO, set up a little pitch/video for each application with a download button and see how many people click download on each. You just have an error message when they click download saying sorry, the product is currently unavailable. But you collect the data and see which one wins. Also you could have a comments/suggestion on each to let customers tell you if you're close but they really want something else.
- OstiaAntica 15y agoThat doesn't seem ethical, and the tactic may violate U.S. truth in advertising laws.
- aymeric 15y agoThis is what people call "ghetto testing" or the Tim Ferriss method.