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Comment by gruseom | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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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