Comment by sushrutbidwai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sushrutbidwai | Hacker News Reader

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I dont think starbucks advice is that terrible. Even though mechanicle turk does seem like a good alternative, I would much rather go to a coffee shop or a bar where I know startup savvy people hang out and discuss it in person. But one of the best advice I ever received is - Start a blog and gain some traction for it before you launch your MVP. Discuss customer stories and problems you are looking to solve. Ask people opinion about your solution, discuss/debate in public. Use these discussion to keep on refining your direction and feature set. As a positive side effect you might end up creating a passionate community around your solution before launching and have list of people interested in paying you money beforehand.

I imagine that mechanical turkers don't future customers. You want to find people that would pay to use your product, not the other way around.

Right. I feel that this article doesn't give strong arguments as to why the advice is terrible in the first place.

Lying to people and manipulating their sympathy to validate a business idea is wrong. I imagine the OP didn't imagine this was something that had to be pointed out to people--even if you don't agree with that viewpoint it's not exactly a difficult one to imagine, and it's better to state as a premise that it's a bad idea rather than bog down a blog post--which seemed more focused on discussing alternative methods--into a tedious moral argument that won't convince anyone.

I dont think saying my idea as my friends idea is much lying. But I do think that you should be straight about it being your idea and use conversation skills to make sure people still give you honest advice.

You lie to people every day just to function normally in society. You must be a terrible sinner. Boo hoo.

While were at it let's throw in a good dose of violence, because that can help us get what we want as well.

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