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get 30 people to fully commit to pay for your product before you even start coding it. I can't think of any valuable product that was created this way.

by ronilan 13y ago

runako 13y ago
That's quite the sweeping dismissal of Kickstarter.
- logicallee 13y ago
  The level of work to do a successful Kickstarter is way in excess of "before you even start coding it." I can't imagine anyone who could do a successful kickstarter on a project that hasn't even begun (not even a line of code).
- awj 13y ago
  ...I'd like to see this mysterious Kickstarter page that has had basically no work done in advance.
  - MattGrommes 13y ago
    You should probably revise that to 'successful Kickstarter page'. I've seen plenty of doomed Kickstarters that clearly had very little to no work done ahead of time. Which kind of shows the previous point. If you want to see lots of doomed Kickstarter campaigns, look at the local listings for your town. I live in San Diego and even for a big city there are tons of campaigns that maybe earn 1% of their goal and look thrown together with little planning.
lifebeyondfife 13y ago
Obviously it depends on your exit strategy. Do you want to (a) get a loss making but huge user base or (b) bootstrap a business that has cashflows from day 1? Sounds like that advice applies more to the latter route than the former.
michaelbuckbee 13y ago
Well Jason Cohen wasn't talking in the abstract, he's talked about how he got checks up front before starting WP-Engine.
chrismorgan 13y ago
Note the careful wording: "before you even start coding it". Coding is a time-consuming thing, very fragile (if you get it wrong, you may almost need to start over again) and brittle (making changes is, connectedly, hard). Very significant validation can be done without ever writing code. (That's a lesson that I've been learning this year, as one who delights greatly in coding.)

get 30 people to fully commit to pay for your product before you even start coding it. I can't think of any valuable product that was created this way.

by ronilan 13y ago

get 30 people to fully commit to pay for your product before you even start coding it. I can't think of any valuable product that was created this way.

runako 13y ago

That's quite the sweeping dismissal of Kickstarter.

logicallee 13y ago
The level of work to do a successful Kickstarter is way in excess of "before you even start coding it." I can't imagine anyone who could do a successful kickstarter on a project that hasn't even begun (not even a line of code).
awj 13y ago
...I'd like to see this mysterious Kickstarter page that has had basically no work done in advance.
- MattGrommes 13y ago
  You should probably revise that to 'successful Kickstarter page'. I've seen plenty of doomed Kickstarters that clearly had very little to no work done ahead of time. Which kind of shows the previous point. If you want to see lots of doomed Kickstarter campaigns, look at the local listings for your town. I live in San Diego and even for a big city there are tons of campaigns that maybe earn 1% of their goal and look thrown together with little planning.

lifebeyondfife 13y ago

Obviously it depends on your exit strategy. Do you want to (a) get a loss making but huge user base or (b) bootstrap a business that has cashflows from day 1? Sounds like that advice applies more to the latter route than the former.

michaelbuckbee 13y ago

Well Jason Cohen wasn't talking in the abstract, he's talked about how he got checks up front before starting WP-Engine.

chrismorgan 13y ago

Note the careful wording: "before you even start coding it". Coding is a time-consuming thing, very fragile (if you get it wrong, you may almost need to start over again) and brittle (making changes is, connectedly, hard). Very significant validation can be done without ever writing code. (That's a lesson that I've been learning this year, as one who delights greatly in coding.)