How to test if your startup idea will succeed | Hacker News Reader

How to test if your startup idea will succeed

untemplater.com

12 pointsmgrouchy4 comments

In keeping with this quote: "Ask your target demographic if your idea would solve their pain" I'd like to ask everyone here if they'd be interested in an app I want to work on.

Basically it would be a web app that would let you plug in FAQ/Help dialogs into your web app.

The code would be something like

  <div id="helpButton">
  <a href="#section/lists" class="helpdialog">Help</a>
  </div>
  <div id="webAppStuff">
  Your Todo List App Here
  </div>
  <script src="http://myhelpapp.com?api_key=647y89y423hg8qg3"></script>

Screenshot of the design I want to use: http://twitpic.com/1209jh

That's the OSX version of the jQuery Simple Modal plugin.

You just add "helpdialog" as a class to any link or button or whatever and it would read the href attribute of that item to get the correct help section to display.

I like the idea and the UI pattern quite a bit - are you thinking of this as an open source project or as something people will pay for? I think it's a great open source product but I would be surprised to see someone pay for it.

I think if the product was good enough people would definitely pay for it. I would just need some stats and facts to back up my claim that it's worth it. That would be the hard part.

But if I can state "Use this service to reduce support emails by 30%" and have the data to back that up, then that's something people might pay for. If you spend 1 hour a day answering support emails, and you can cut that down to 40 minutes, then you're saving more than 6 hours of work a month. That's worth some money.

The tough part is making it good enough to be a time saver.

The reason I made that comment is that from what I see so far, it is rather trivial to implement. There's not a lot of detail in what I saw so far so maybe I am missing something. However, if all you have is a popup or tooltip to a FAQ - the cost to implement that is much, much less than the cost of writing effective documentation for each feature. I think the tough part is putting together some set of features that justifies not only the cost - but also the risk of adding an external dependency. I hate external dependencies, particularly those from unknown players that are not open source.

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