Ask HN: Should I exhibit my rough early-stage product? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Should I exhibit my rough early-stage product?

I have a SaaS tool that is in a very early stage. I'm onboarding my first alpha user next week.

There's a conference for my target tech niche in my town that's coming up in mid-October. Should I exhibit? The cost is $1000 early-bird before Aug 1, or $1500 after. I can decide not to exhibit before Mid-Sept and lose a $500 deposit. This cost is minor to my budget.

I'll have a working product, and I'll have feedback from a few teams at that point. But I'm worried that my product will still be _rough_ and might not make a good impression.

How should I weight the pros/cons?

One side of my wants to stay quiet, and just work with a few - dozen companies I reach out to directly, and spend some more months on their feedback before pushing marketing.

Another side of my thinks it would be better to get more feedback from more people, even if it's an early-stage and kind of rough.

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If you're still early stage and looking for feedback you should look for feedback from actual users. Taking feedback from non-users may skew your feedback away from what actual users would provide. The audience which pays for a product and provides feedback will be different from the feedback you would receive from people watching a conference demo.

There is some hype provided by a conference demo and you may get feedback from designers + programmers. This type of feedback will be different from normal users and at an early stage the benefit may be low if your saas product provides a substantial benefit to users.

If you've already put down some money though, it may be worth seeing what other technical people think. At least you should know that this will likely be more nit-picky than the general utility type feedback non-technical people would give. It will probably help with UX + programming but less with the value prop of your product.

If it's a technical product - think about what would make the conference audience recommend your product to other potential users.

Go, get more feedback. Even some rough edges during the conference won't matter as that won't be seen usually.

The mistake almost all founders make is not getting enough exposure early and working on the specific feedback, there really is almost no such thing as too much exposure.

If I was you and the conference fees work with your budget I'd be there, in fact if it wasn't in the budget I'd be trying to find the money to make it work so I could go.

I’m a marketer and we help our clients with a few trade shows a year.

If you are going to have a booth, table cloth, marketing materials (flyers, brochure, etc) you cost will be more than then the $1,500 for the space. Depending on the type of show many will also charge you for WiFi and power. Even on the low spend side, I’d anticipate spending $3k plus your food, lodging and travel costs.

Upside is many shows will provide you with the whole list of attendees which while aren’t leads - can be useful for future outreach without hunting down names/emails on your own.

Like others mentioned if it’s not a lot of money, then go and get feedback about the pain your product is solving. In addition to that, you can meet other vendors who can be good referral and industry connections if you don’t have that yet.

My experience: I have built a failed product that no one needed before and it was an expensive (couple million) and long exercise (2 yrs) in futility that would have been helped by getting face to face with our target audience earlier, not later.

Would you be comfortable sharing the product you worked on and a postmortem on why it didn't succeed?

I'd find it helpful to learn from as I'm in the process of getting early feedback from businesses to validate or tweak my own tiny saas idea.

Although exposure and feedback are great, I think that exposure via a $1000/$1500 exhibit is a very expensive way to validate parts of your SaaS product at your stage. It isn't that it won't generate leads, it is just a pricey way of doing so.

Since you have 2 contradictory comments right now, I’ll add a 3rd that doesn’t break the tie: is $1k a lot to you? If not, it would be a great way to get feedback. If it is a lot of money to you, then there are cheaper ways to get feedback at the cost of more of your time. Good luck!

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