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> Use networking to determine how valuable the product is and if people give a damn about it. If no one wants to talk to you about it, no one is going to want t

> Use networking to determine how valuable the product is and if people give a damn about it. If no one wants to talk to you about it, no one is going to want to pay for it. This is a key thing. A lot of developers operate in the belief that “if you build it they will come”. A small amount of market validation would prevent a lot of wasted time. - Do people have the problem you are solving? - Are they willing to pay a sufficient amount to solve it? - Are there enough of them to make it worthwhile? The real danger is that we often don’t want to hear the answers to these questions. So we either don’t ask or we dismiss the answers that we get. Wishful thinking is a dangerous thing.

hermitcrab 2y ago
This is all true. But it isn't as easy as it sounds. When you start out, you probably only have a vague idea of what the product will be. The sort of people you want to talk to might not want to talk to you. They are busy people and you don't even have a product! People saying they will give you money is worthless, in my experience. Only people actually giving you money counts for anything. Estimating the market size is hard and not all that relevant. See also: https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/03/11/the-1-percent-fallacy/ https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/03/11/the-1-percent-fall...
- iamflimflam1 2y ago
  I think that is part of the problem. Starting out with only a vague idea of what the product will be sounds very unwise. Successful businesses I have worked at have started out solving a real problem for someone (in a business) - with that person telling us that they know other businesses have the same problem. If someone in an industry comes to you with a problem - and they have worked in the industry sufficiently long enough to have been in multiple companies - they can give you a pretty good idea of what size the prize might be. The difficulty a lot of us have working in software is that we don’t really get enough exposure to these people.
  - Appsmith 2y ago
    This is right on the money (speaking from experience)! Simple and superb root cause analysis!
- yieldcrv 2y ago
  This is whats perfect about web3 that most pundits miss It takes the looooong web 2.0 funnels and flips it to a single step: Your customers pay to interact with your app at all and there is insatiable demand at the beginning, unless you do some boomer-level system design that is based on pretending that a 3 trillion dollar crypto native audience doesnt exist already and you need to onboard a bunch of technophobes. In comparison, the entire web 2.0 ethos basically sums up to getting a customer to put their credit card into your website for a small charge, as a funnel for a bigger recurring charge later in web3 all of your users are at the last step at the very beginning. they are even paying for all your hosting costs. they are paying to update your database! and your actual business model of being some form of plumbing with a transaction fee, if you didnt just sell a token collection, is fine and has low overhead costs this will continue attracting developers and their entire audience in perpetuity because the entire web 2.0 ecosystem cannot compete with that
  - lokimedes 2y ago
    This must be how it sounds when I preach nuclear power as the be-all, end-all solution to our climate and energy crises. Thank you for the insights.
  - yakshaving_jgt 2y ago
    As it happens, the people you disparagingly refer to as boomers are often the ones holding the purse strings.
    - onetokeoverthe 2y ago
      Your elders designed and built the system of boxes, chips, wires, cables and tubes this thing runs on.
    - yieldcrv 2y ago
      that doesn’t matter here and it wasn’t really disparaging the only people that have an issue with web3 have a characteristic and typically describe an irrelevant system design that doesn’t factor in the simple reality that users are paying in web3 and wouldn’t in web2.0, the only people having an issue creating web3 apps have a characteristic, for example I just got off a call with someone trying to jump on the web3 bandwagon for hotel reservations - a technophobic audience that should be ignored for web3 ux fictions - and the only people funding broken web2 apps that are supposed to use web3 rails have a characteristic reclaim the term like every marginalized group does
- mdorazio 2y ago
  If you only have a vague idea of what the product will be (or at least what the real problem to solve is) and you don't have any potential buyers to talk to then you really shouldn't be writing a single line of code at all. You should be building your network and experience so that you do understand those things, then you go and build an MVP. So many developers fall into this trap. I always recommend the book The Mom Test to would-be entrepreneurs. It goes into more detail on why asking people if they will buy something is worthless (as you mentioned), and how you can ask much better questions to find and validate problems worth solving.
  - kevin_nisbet 2y ago
    +1 on recommending the Mom Test, it's one of the most important books I've read. I'd say in addition to entrepreneurs, it's an important book for product teams / product engineers to understand what the Mom Test teaches, and tune the filter on asking the right questions to get the highest signal, and ensure the solution closely matches the value prop for the customer. Then sales and marketing get a whole lot easier when you've asked the right questions and solved the right problems.
  - ozim 2y ago
    You could write MVP for yourself to get a clear view how much work it really is. Just set correct expectations that your MVP won’t be something for the customers. Or maybe it will. But I think biggest issue is having high hopes after completing v0.1.
nthingtohide 2y ago
2 and 3 apply to this case study. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30831688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30831688
kingofheroes 2y ago
One thing I've always stumbled on is finding the people to even ask the questions to. How do you contact people in the domain you're interested in and how do you convince them to give you the time of day?
avgDev 2y ago
I'm the polar opposite. I don't waste anytime and never felt like I stumbled on a product idea that warrants me building something. Therefore, I haven't built anything but the projects at work.

hermitcrab 2y ago

This is all true. But it isn't as easy as it sounds. When you start out, you probably only have a vague idea of what the product will be. The sort of people you want to talk to might not want to talk to you. They are busy people and you don't even have a product! People saying they will give you money is worthless, in my experience. Only people actually giving you money counts for anything. Estimating the market size is hard and not all that relevant. See also: https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/03/11/the-1-percent-fallacy/ https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/03/11/the-1-percent-fall...

iamflimflam1 2y ago
I think that is part of the problem. Starting out with only a vague idea of what the product will be sounds very unwise. Successful businesses I have worked at have started out solving a real problem for someone (in a business) - with that person telling us that they know other businesses have the same problem. If someone in an industry comes to you with a problem - and they have worked in the industry sufficiently long enough to have been in multiple companies - they can give you a pretty good idea of what size the prize might be. The difficulty a lot of us have working in software is that we don’t really get enough exposure to these people.
- Appsmith 2y ago
  This is right on the money (speaking from experience)! Simple and superb root cause analysis!
yieldcrv 2y ago
This is whats perfect about web3 that most pundits miss It takes the looooong web 2.0 funnels and flips it to a single step: Your customers pay to interact with your app at all and there is insatiable demand at the beginning, unless you do some boomer-level system design that is based on pretending that a 3 trillion dollar crypto native audience doesnt exist already and you need to onboard a bunch of technophobes. In comparison, the entire web 2.0 ethos basically sums up to getting a customer to put their credit card into your website for a small charge, as a funnel for a bigger recurring charge later in web3 all of your users are at the last step at the very beginning. they are even paying for all your hosting costs. they are paying to update your database! and your actual business model of being some form of plumbing with a transaction fee, if you didnt just sell a token collection, is fine and has low overhead costs this will continue attracting developers and their entire audience in perpetuity because the entire web 2.0 ecosystem cannot compete with that
- lokimedes 2y ago
  This must be how it sounds when I preach nuclear power as the be-all, end-all solution to our climate and energy crises. Thank you for the insights.
- yakshaving_jgt 2y ago
  As it happens, the people you disparagingly refer to as boomers are often the ones holding the purse strings.
  - onetokeoverthe 2y ago
    Your elders designed and built the system of boxes, chips, wires, cables and tubes this thing runs on.
  - yieldcrv 2y ago
    that doesn’t matter here and it wasn’t really disparaging the only people that have an issue with web3 have a characteristic and typically describe an irrelevant system design that doesn’t factor in the simple reality that users are paying in web3 and wouldn’t in web2.0, the only people having an issue creating web3 apps have a characteristic, for example I just got off a call with someone trying to jump on the web3 bandwagon for hotel reservations - a technophobic audience that should be ignored for web3 ux fictions - and the only people funding broken web2 apps that are supposed to use web3 rails have a characteristic reclaim the term like every marginalized group does
mdorazio 2y ago
If you only have a vague idea of what the product will be (or at least what the real problem to solve is) and you don't have any potential buyers to talk to then you really shouldn't be writing a single line of code at all. You should be building your network and experience so that you do understand those things, then you go and build an MVP. So many developers fall into this trap. I always recommend the book The Mom Test to would-be entrepreneurs. It goes into more detail on why asking people if they will buy something is worthless (as you mentioned), and how you can ask much better questions to find and validate problems worth solving.
- kevin_nisbet 2y ago
  +1 on recommending the Mom Test, it's one of the most important books I've read. I'd say in addition to entrepreneurs, it's an important book for product teams / product engineers to understand what the Mom Test teaches, and tune the filter on asking the right questions to get the highest signal, and ensure the solution closely matches the value prop for the customer. Then sales and marketing get a whole lot easier when you've asked the right questions and solved the right problems.
- ozim 2y ago
  You could write MVP for yourself to get a clear view how much work it really is. Just set correct expectations that your MVP won’t be something for the customers. Or maybe it will. But I think biggest issue is having high hopes after completing v0.1.

nthingtohide 2y ago

2 and 3 apply to this case study. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30831688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30831688

kingofheroes 2y ago

One thing I've always stumbled on is finding the people to even ask the questions to. How do you contact people in the domain you're interested in and how do you convince them to give you the time of day?

avgDev 2y ago

I'm the polar opposite. I don't waste anytime and never felt like I stumbled on a product idea that warrants me building something. Therefore, I haven't built anything but the projects at work.