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> Yeah, also what's wrong with making a product first, marketing it, and seeing if it sells? No need for this landing-page-with-fake-pre-orders lying to your cu

> Yeah, also what's wrong with making a product first, marketing it, and seeing if it sells? No need for this landing-page-with-fake-pre-orders lying to your customers overhead. The overhead of actually building the product is WAY more than just making a landing page. Plus, knowing that there are people who are willing to give you money for a thing is very motivating. Also, having pre-customers while you are building is a great way to know which parts of the product to focus on. The features you think are important may not be what your customers think. Certainly there is a range of approaches in between vaporware and building in secret. But if you actually want to make money, you should start selling as soon as possible, even before it’s ready.

scottLobster 4y ago
Sounds an awful lot like that kid in the group project who lies about doing their piece of the work and then throws it together at the last minute out of guilt. Tends to result in a half-assed, low-quality effort that brings the rest of the group down. Granted you should establish hard criteria for an MVP and not try to make everything perfect, the temptation for feature creep as you further explore the problem space is real. But if I'm offering someone a shovel I at least want a competently built V1 of a shovel, not a pinky swear that I'll have an awesome shovel for them in 2 months. Features are a little trickier. Whatever the customers say they want may or may not be what they actually want, depending on the specific context of course. Or the customers say they want X, but they aren't actually willing to pay for X. There's a lot of noise that looks like signal. You see it in startup blogs all the time "I thought customers wanted this, and they kinda did, but it was actually this other variant that we didn't discover until we analyzed data from the first year of sales" Rather than debate on what may or may not be on the other side of the hill, I'd land on the side of going and taking a look, even if that means some extra time/effort/money climbing said hill. You'll at least get a good workout and be stronger for it even if there's nothing of value on the other side. Meanwhile your day job covers the downside risk :) I guess it comes down to your last line "if you actually want to make money". At what scale and to what end? Waiting to start selling until you have something to sell might technically be leaving money on the table, but if it makes enough money and results in a better overall product, and you have a more long-term outlook, can be worth it. Granted not every sector and objective is amenable to that strategy, but there are so many in this space who dismiss it outright as naive, as if business with physical products don't do it all the time.

scottLobster 4y ago

Sounds an awful lot like that kid in the group project who lies about doing their piece of the work and then throws it together at the last minute out of guilt. Tends to result in a half-assed, low-quality effort that brings the rest of the group down. Granted you should establish hard criteria for an MVP and not try to make everything perfect, the temptation for feature creep as you further explore the problem space is real. But if I'm offering someone a shovel I at least want a competently built V1 of a shovel, not a pinky swear that I'll have an awesome shovel for them in 2 months. Features are a little trickier. Whatever the customers say they want may or may not be what they actually want, depending on the specific context of course. Or the customers say they want X, but they aren't actually willing to pay for X. There's a lot of noise that looks like signal. You see it in startup blogs all the time "I thought customers wanted this, and they kinda did, but it was actually this other variant that we didn't discover until we analyzed data from the first year of sales" Rather than debate on what may or may not be on the other side of the hill, I'd land on the side of going and taking a look, even if that means some extra time/effort/money climbing said hill. You'll at least get a good workout and be stronger for it even if there's nothing of value on the other side. Meanwhile your day job covers the downside risk :) I guess it comes down to your last line "if you actually want to make money". At what scale and to what end? Waiting to start selling until you have something to sell might technically be leaving money on the table, but if it makes enough money and results in a better overall product, and you have a more long-term outlook, can be worth it. Granted not every sector and objective is amenable to that strategy, but there are so many in this space who dismiss it outright as naive, as if business with physical products don't do it all the time.