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Comment by vinhboy | Hacker News Reader

I advocated for a "Dry Test" with our company's SEM campaign, for features that we will build. My co-workers thought it was deceiving and would flounder customers' trust. What do you guys think?

Keep in mind in SEM you are reaching out to potential customers, not existing ones.

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"Dry testing" in software is traditionally called "vaporware". It's been found to be an excellent way of taking sales away from competitors with actual products on the market, who are hampered by not being dishonest scumbags and only being able to get away with claims that are feasible.

I'm probably a minority, but your reputation with me is toast if I find out you ever did dry testing.

I understand the sentiment, but I'm curious how you personally judge an expensive idea without spending the 6 months to develop it? A simple web app may take a weekend, but that's not the only type of minimum viable product, unfortunately.

Market research still works when you admit to your audience that's what you're doing. They say it's somewhat less accurate that way, but even if that's true it doesn't entitle anyone to throw chaff into the system that allocates resources to us.

I spent some time at a startup in 2006 that was trying to build a business around what the OP is calling dry testing. It's very easy to cross the line into deception. If you're implying that the product or feature exists, I think that's deceptive. Why not just explain that you're testing to decide what you should develop, ask for the relevant feedback, and let people sign up to be notified if you build it?

Because feedback in that form is generally worthless. It's like going to a meet-up and tossing around your idea. You'll get a LOT of 'feedback' all of it as completely worthless as what your thinking already.

The whole idea behind a MVP is to get worthwhile feedback about the product. Feedback in the form of customers actions. Will people actually buy this? Will they respond to what I'm doing? Can I get traction?

None of those things can be answered with a submission form on a landing page.

I have long agreed with the author here. While there are answers to be found in dry testing... it takes a prototype to really solicit any truly meaningful answers about a product. At least in my experience.

I don't disagree. The landing page tests I saw were largely worthless. Most of the time there wasn't significant data, and even then it was so far from obvious how to interpret it that people simply confirmed pre-existing biases. But perhaps others have figured out how to make effective use of such data. My point was different: if you are going to do it, eschew being deceptive. Deception destroys more value than testing creates.

Was the startup building solutions around generating content for dry tests? Like a skeleton landing page generator? That thought crossed my mind as I read through some of these articles.

No, the idea was to run tests and build the products that showed uptake, and then to repeat the whole process incrementally as a feedback loop. But it didn't work for a number of reasons, two of which I cited above.

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