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Comment by dangero | Hacker News Reader

I've crashed and burned on SaaS enough that I'm very into the landing page approach -- don't build the product, but convince people you have so that they can click the "buy now" button. That way you feel more confident that the market exists while you're actually building it. After all the projects I've failed at, nothing is harder for me to do than spend 200+ hours on something without having a clue whether it will reap benefits or not. Corey spent 100 hours trying to gather traction. He could have potentially skipped the 100 hours it took to build it and instead just tested the sales side.

There are people who can know where a market is and confidently blaze straight into it without any validation. I think I'm just not that genius or lucky.

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If I understand you correctly: You whip up a bootstrap page that describes the product with a 'beta sign-up & pay' button, and if enough people sign up and pay, you build it?

- What sort of demo do you have on the website? Or is it just a basic description of the product and a list of features?

- Does this mean you get payment processing setup before development every time?

- How do you manage returning money if you decide not to do it?

I usually just do believable screenshots and a call to action like, "Request a trial" or "Buy now" it depends on what it's for.

I never take any money I just log the actions people took on the site. If it's a buy button, then you can just say, "Thanks for your interest. We are launching soon."

But it can also have the opposite effect: people get put off as they think the product is vaporware (rightfully).

Let's say you get 20 people to signup, all of whom think it is (rightfully) vaporware. Well, at least now you can be sure there's a real market (>>20) to justify development. Even if you drop those 20 on the floor... the validation is more than worthwhile.

My experience in doing this has been that a surprising number of people who click the buy button still put their email address down afterwards, and none of the people I've talked to who did were remotely miffed about the deception.

It probably depends on the audience, but people are more understanding than you'd think about the need to look before you leap, especially when they know you're just a solo entrepreneur.

If I clicked on that button and received that response, everything I could find connected with you and your domain would go on my blacklists. Misleading people is a poor way to build trust.

Yes you're right on your count, but you have to consider this scenario (which involves thinking beyond yourself) - - it's only you, and 20 others - - who would be mildly mislead (considering you actually didn't pay anything)

Now the dev can go build a working version putting in 200-500 hours into the MVP and find the next set of 20 people who are ready to use that software, with validation at hand.

However, I agree that better messaging can be used instead of straight up misleading people. Since if it does become widely practiced, people will generally become mistrustful (again, the odds of that happening is low).

~ 2 cents

> but you have to consider this scenario (which involves thinking beyond yourself)

I'm not denying that poor behaviour can net more customers -- on the contrary, it's by far the easiest way of doing so. My response was in the domain of ethical, not commercial, calculus.

Exactly. Don't think of people landing on the site as an infinite stream of people. There are influencers who land first and you don't want to be in their bad books.

Not necessarily, you can buy adds and get random visitors for testing purposes that way. Also you can write a better explanation, so that people don't feel tricked.

Really? You maintain a 'blacklist' somewhere on Dropbox or so, and every time you make a purchase you look through who is somehow connected to it, and cross check your 'blacklist'? I think it's much more likely you're showing some internet outrage here, but when you actually run into it, you won't even remember a week later.

Yes I do maintain a blacklist. The main vehicle is: when I see something I find unconscionable from a company with I'll add an Adguard rule to block their domain name. It's hardly water-tight, but what is?

Your "I think it's much more likely" is a bit odd considering what you know about me (ie. almost nothing). "Outrage" is also pretty exaggerated. There are millions of commercial outfits out there in the world, the vast majority of which I'll never have anything to do with. There's a low bar for me to exclude just one more from consideration.

Respectfully, there is plenty fish in the sea.

I would have validated the viability at the cost of losing one customer. I think most would be willing to take that loss.

Only if you take a point of view that ethics can be shelved in the interests of business. It's a common point of view, in fact pretty clearly it prevails. It doesn't happen to be mine.

You don't have to make people pay, when they click on "buy" or "prices" you just display a page that explains the project isn't ready, with a newsletter form. Search for "buffer MVP" to see a classic example of this.

The demo can be extremely simple, a sentence describing the concept and a (fake) screenshot.

Be aware that presenting the same product in different ways to different people lead to very different results, so you can run multiple tests like this to find the approach that has the better chances of working.

I'm curious, if you're willing to share, what were the projects you worked on that failed?

I built a competitor to Reddit and Digg (at the time) called RatherGather that had some differentiators that ended up not mattering to people. I wish I understood Metcalfe's Law better at the time.

I built a mobile game called Roaring Racers where you had to use your voice to make your car move (roar louder, go faster).

I built a stickers app for iOS stickers launch that allowed you to import anything. This one wasn't a total dud, but the way Apple positioned the store, the traction wasn't at a scale that made it worth my time.

And then of course there's the laundry list of companies that I've been employed by and built products for where months into it I discovered nobody in the company had really done any market testing, but they got clearance to build something for $XXX,XXX anyways.

9/10 startups fail, so just by nature of that fact, most of us spend our time working on building tech that never really "makes it".

There have been great successes too, but you asked about the failures.

Edit:

I forgot one that is fairly recent too. I built a Windows app that allowed you to watch Twitch picture in picture while playing a game. Sold one copy before shutting it down.

Roaring racers sounds like a brilliant idea! Where can I play it??

It came out maybe a year after the App Store launched, and the 100 copies I sold never justified maintaining it. It's long gone. Only way to play it would be an old iPhone that still has it installed and I don't even have one of those.

Good idea but I for one am glad that roaring racers did not become pokemon go. Kids are loud enough.

I absolutely love your creativity and persistence. Thanks for sharing. You're totally going to hit one out of the park.

Tragedy of the commons. This stops working as everyone creates these vaporware pages.

That was known back in the day as "vaporware". Somehow today that concept evolved into "marketing".

Any recommendations for quick and effective landing page solutions? I assume something like MailChimp for email sign-ups?

https://launchrock.com is the classic tool for this.

Email signups don't really validate your idea anymore, even if they manage to get you some emails.

There was a post a while ago on Reddit where someone built this little project:

https://fauxbuy.com

Basically lets you add a fake buy button easily and emails you when someone attempts to buy.

I'm building something to do exactly this at https://nichetester.com - I should note that I used the method described in the OP to validate it and it worked really well :).

I absolutely love that the website that promises to build a testing decoy is a testing decoy. Perfect. (img idontknowwhatiexpected.gif)

Well, it worked - I just signed up!

landbot.io is interesting. Try it out

I think the second/third/forth SaaS site won't take 200 hours once you get in the groove.

That's essentially what Kickstarter is. You get backed before you build your product, and you don't even need to convince people it exists because they expect your product not to be finished.

I think it's an excellent model as long as you live up to your promise and deliver above and beyond expectations.

It's how I started my software developer course selling business and validated the idea (spending hundreds of hours making a course is no different than a SAAS MVP).

I wrote all about this process recently in an Indie Hackers interview: https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/nick-janetakis.

Do you only consider a project a success when other people are using it?

I don't mean to sound harsh, but, just 200+ hours? That's a little more than a month of work. I wouldn't even begin to expect any meaningful returns with just one month of full-time work.

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