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Comment by hop | Hacker News Reader

If you are not intuitive enough to know what people will buy and need outside validation, it may be a tough road to being a successful entrepreneur. To build great products, you have to know what people want. Maybe if your product had massive upfront capital costs - like a chip fab - you would get some signed purchase orders before hand, but if its a web app, you should be confident enough to just do it.

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Sorry, but I completely disagree. Do some contract development work for awhile. People start pouring out of every crevice and crack with their brilliant ideas that they're absolutely sure will work. I know from experience that very few of them will go anywhere. Sad, but true.

The only way to build great products using your gut it to scratch your own itch. This is a completely valid approach that can work really well, but even then, you're better off doing this customer validation thing. You might be the only customer out there. And yeah, web apps are cheap to build compared to chip fab plants, but why spend several months building something and then another 6-24 months pushing it to get traction (the really hard part) if you can find out that there's no market with a few days of work?

Finally, I know quite a few successful entrepreneurs who are huge advocates of the customer development model, so I hardly think that being a great entrepreneur requires you to avoid talking to your potential customers before you start building, and hoping that you're just the 1 in a million genius who really does get it. You're almost certainly not Steve Jobs, my friend. Survivorship bias is the only reason we think we might be...we don't see the millions of failures who thought they could predict the market's desires without talking to them.

I own a product design company and people come to us all the day with ideas for products they want brought to market

Folks unsure of their product/idea tend to not have a great product or are just not good at starting a business. But the people that know a market exists for their idea and just need it implemented are more than likely to succeed.

I'm racking my brain to think of any successful entrepreneurs that had to get validation before they started. Jeff Bezos? No, he had an idea for an online bookstore, quit his job, moved to Seattle and started one. 37Signals? I bet Jason Fried asked for lots of validation. Steve Jobs? No, they built the Apple 1 and started selling it. Henry Ford famously said "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

Read the last sentence of my previous post again...you think of those people because they're the rare ones who can succeed based on their gut alone, allegedly doing no customer development or validation. I'm not even sure I buy that part...didn't Jobs and Woz spend tons of time hanging out with computer hobbyists in the early days? Seems like a good way to learn what your market wants. And Fried was scratching his own itch, which as I've already said is a separate thing.

I just don't get why you wouldn't try to find out if you'll be able to find customers before you spend all the time and money to build the thing.

The problem with that, as far as I see it, is that even the most brilliant people are wrong sometimes, especially if they're less experienced. If you can afford being wrong (maybe multiple times) and you really believe that you're right and everyone else is wrong, that's really cool, but otherwise it's a good idea to see what potential customers might think of your concepts.

I don't really understand the downvotes here, he speaks the truth. Every rule has exceptions, especially the "get 10 signed customers" rule. If you are passionate about the idea, then you should be confident and let it ride.

The issue as I see it is that not everyone has great vision when it comes to building products/services one could turn a business into. In fact most don't which is why the 10-will-you-buy test is a good way of hacking around this lack of vision.

The funny thing is that the blog's author himself succeeded without talking to customers. Imagine if he talked, found out nobody wants it and quit without pivoting.

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