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Why not pay someone to develop your side project? More importantly if you want to put survivorship bias on your side, never develop anything until you have a w

by _3u10 5y ago

Why not pay someone to develop your side project? More importantly if you want to put survivorship bias on your side, never develop anything until you have a working sales funnel. Put $1000 aside a month on a design and site for your idea, followed by a marketing person w/ a budget. The screen following getting their card should be a page letting them know you aren’t onbaording new customers, their card hasn’t been charged and you’ll let them know when you’re taking on more customers (eg. The product is built)

Kaze404 5y ago
> The screen following getting their card should be a page letting them know you aren’t onbaording new customers, their card hasn’t been charged and you’ll let them know when you’re taking on more customers (eg. The product is built) If a website did this to me they'd also be getting a very angry e-mail and zero recommendations from me.
- cercatrova 5y ago
  Then you're not the target customer. I hear this often that people, especially on HN, don't like this tactic, but most people don't really care, they'll just shrug and move on.
- nlh 5y ago
  Yup agreed 100%. I see this often as a suggestion for testing your project hypothesis and I think it’s a terrible idea. Starting your relationship with a customer by misrepresenting your state of development is bad advice.
  - _3u10 5y ago
    They aren’t customers as they haven’t bought anything. Second not spending hundreds of thousands to millions in dev on a product with no market vs having to buy a new domain because your site went viral and you now have millions of bad reviews. (Hint: this never happens) Is great advice. There’s also other ways to do it, my friend was creating a course so I got her to do all the marketing first, set a date six months out and used the proceeds of the first sales to fund development. What I’m trying to get at is to verify sales you need to get people to put their money on the line.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
nlh 5y ago
For me at least, the answer is that my side projects are about more than money (though they are about money too!). Developing things myself is the primary goal - it’s deeply satisfying to build your own project from the bottom up without having to write specs, argue about design trade offs, do code reviews, etc. The fun is just being able to build without the social overhead. As soon as you have people working for you, that whole equation changes.

by _3u10 5y ago

Kaze404 5y ago

> The screen following getting their card should be a page letting them know you aren’t onbaording new customers, their card hasn’t been charged and you’ll let them know when you’re taking on more customers (eg. The product is built) If a website did this to me they'd also be getting a very angry e-mail and zero recommendations from me.

cercatrova 5y ago
Then you're not the target customer. I hear this often that people, especially on HN, don't like this tactic, but most people don't really care, they'll just shrug and move on.
nlh 5y ago
Yup agreed 100%. I see this often as a suggestion for testing your project hypothesis and I think it’s a terrible idea. Starting your relationship with a customer by misrepresenting your state of development is bad advice.
- _3u10 5y ago
  They aren’t customers as they haven’t bought anything. Second not spending hundreds of thousands to millions in dev on a product with no market vs having to buy a new domain because your site went viral and you now have millions of bad reviews. (Hint: this never happens) Is great advice. There’s also other ways to do it, my friend was creating a course so I got her to do all the marketing first, set a date six months out and used the proceeds of the first sales to fund development. What I’m trying to get at is to verify sales you need to get people to put their money on the line.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

nlh 5y ago

For me at least, the answer is that my side projects are about more than money (though they are about money too!). Developing things myself is the primary goal - it’s deeply satisfying to build your own project from the bottom up without having to write specs, argue about design trade offs, do code reviews, etc. The fun is just being able to build without the social overhead. As soon as you have people working for you, that whole equation changes.