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Most of your potential market may have never heard of HN, much less have established karma here. Not defending my lowly position and certainly understand what y

Most of your potential market may have never heard of HN, much less have established karma here. Not defending my lowly position and certainly understand what you're getting at, but I do not think you're doing your idea justice by taking 'Ask HN' as a solid interest gauge. If I were trying to validate this idea, I would probably look to local meetups for co-founders and non-tech founders, LinkedIn groups for tech-business people, and tech-business students. They're your market, so ask them. How long do you think it would take? Are there any substantial costs involved?

padseeker 14y ago
Well, it's basically bringing together 2 groups - technical hacker news reader types and non-technical people with an idea. If I can't get to 30-40 points on hacker news my hope is not that high. Which is not to say it does not have potential or is not worth pursuing. I might not be doing it justice. But based on the new school of thought, where you validate your idea before you build your startup, I am not feeling this is a white hot idea. Still there is potential. I do feel like it may be worth exploring. The source of the idea was going to bootstrapper breakfast in Chicago and hearing a lot of non-technies asking technies what they should do. That was arguably my favorite part, helping those who were not technical figure out the best way to build out their technical needs. Anybody can hire a offshore developer or get a local student to help them out, but there is no guarantee what that person offers to develop is what you should develop. Building out the MVP? I could build it in Rails in under a month as I work full time and can only code after hours. Costs could be close to none if I do the work. Maybe I would buy a bootstrap template so it looks decent. What I really want is what stackexchange already has, with a bit more functionality as it relates to the payment part. I like the upvoting of answers to questions, the way it tracks reputation of users. I'm going to send you an direct email, this idea is worth discussing. Thanks for not abandoning this post.

padseeker 14y ago

Well, it's basically bringing together 2 groups - technical hacker news reader types and non-technical people with an idea. If I can't get to 30-40 points on hacker news my hope is not that high. Which is not to say it does not have potential or is not worth pursuing. I might not be doing it justice. But based on the new school of thought, where you validate your idea before you build your startup, I am not feeling this is a white hot idea. Still there is potential. I do feel like it may be worth exploring. The source of the idea was going to bootstrapper breakfast in Chicago and hearing a lot of non-technies asking technies what they should do. That was arguably my favorite part, helping those who were not technical figure out the best way to build out their technical needs. Anybody can hire a offshore developer or get a local student to help them out, but there is no guarantee what that person offers to develop is what you should develop. Building out the MVP? I could build it in Rails in under a month as I work full time and can only code after hours. Costs could be close to none if I do the work. Maybe I would buy a bootstrap template so it looks decent. What I really want is what stackexchange already has, with a bit more functionality as it relates to the payment part. I like the upvoting of answers to questions, the way it tracks reputation of users. I'm going to send you an direct email, this idea is worth discussing. Thanks for not abandoning this post.