I think you're expecting too much from this method. This is a means of checking the pulse of the market. When you approach an injured person to give them first

I think you're expecting too much from this method. This is a means of checking the pulse of the market. When you approach an injured person to give them first aid, checking their pulse is one of the first things you do. If they don't have a pulse you take appropriate action. But if they do have a pulse, you don't continue checking the pulse again and again, using ever-more-sophisticated pulse-testing technologies. The quality of a paramedic's care is not proportional to how precisely and accurately she can measure your pulse. This test might tell you whether your marketing is going to be very difficult. If you can't get anyone to click on a teaser for your product you've obviously got a problem, and you might want to refine your pitch a bit before doing anything else. Or at least make a plan that involves a relatively long, slow, profitless period during which you shop your minimalist prototype to people and try to build word of mouth. You're right that the real size of your market is hard to estimate with this technique. Tim Ferriss goes so far as to recommend that you take potential customers' emails [1] before putting up the screen that clearly informs them, with great sorrow, that you're "out of stock" and offering to email them when you've got product to ship. I think he's right that this is the only way to be sure that the rubberneckers on your website are actual potential customers, but I'm not sure I'd go so far as to do this. (Even though it looks, to my surprise, like the FTC would condone it if you used the right fine print...) And I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work for software. People don't pay for software unless someone has reviewed it. They're not fools. As for the fact that this model is "mechanistic"... That's why it's a useful spiritual exercise. The tendency to fall in love with your first idea is strong, and the tendency to build the thing that most inspires you -- as opposed to the thing that will cause customers to give you money -- is strong. But it's often easier to make a profitable thing lovable than the other way around. [1] I originally stated, in this post, that Ferriss recommended taking down credit card numbers as well. After looking closely at this part of his book, this turns out not to be true. The fine print matters a lot in cases like this, so I'm sorry for the mistake.