Comment by DirtyAndy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DirtyAndy | Hacker News Reader

Whilst this article is about more than just pitching everyone, that is the first thing that hits you, and personally I disagree with that as an approach. If you are at college coming up with the idea of Facebook then maybe it works, but in general the results you will get are too biased (sometimes in both directions).

People that care about you (parents etc) are likely to like your idea no matter what, friends probably fall into this too. When someone says "that sounds like an OK idea" most people hear "that is the best idea ever". At the other end of the scale some people just don't listen and are negative, they cannot immediately see how it will work and dismiss it as a bad idea. And with regards to things like Mechanical Turk, if your product is really targetting people who are willing to answer questions for a few cents then great, but in general I can't imagine it is that useful.

Pitching and validating ideas against people in your real target market is a good start, but even then there is a massive difference between saying they'll pay for something and actually paying for it. If you pitch someone an idea and it results in useful questions and a level of excitment then that is a better indicator, if someone says that sounds great and then starts talking about something completely offtopic then I would say that means they don't really believe it.

Pitching is not the be-all-end-all, and you'll certainly get to a point where it stops being so useful for you (i.e. if you've already determined the reasons why certain people aren't interested in your product, no need to pitch them). We're not advocating pitching for the sake of pitching, we're advocating being methodical about and maximizing your learning from your pitches.

For example, biases will definitely crop up when you pitch people. They will also crop up when you go to try to acquire customers or deal with users, so it's good practice to field them early on. Going outside your normal circles will expose you to people who aren't your friends just trying to be nice or "experts" who think they know it all and that your product sucks, so that you can 1) sharpen your own communication skills (you'd be surprised how many startups suck at describing what they do), and 2) refine your understanding of customer concerns.

Also, pitching is just the beginning of validating your idea. For example, if you get people who sound excited and say they'll pay for your product, and then they don't, there can be a number of causes: 1) Maybe they were just being nice, 2) Maybe your product doesn't meet their expectations, 3) Maybe they changed their minds, etc. If you don't pitch these people, you don't have the opportunity to develop the customer insights you can get once they take a harder look at your product.

In the event that someone listens to your pitch and is totally disinterested, this can be valuable too. It may be that the person you thought was a potential customer actually isn't - I'd dig deeper to find out why. Maybe you just need to explain it a different way, or catch them at a better time.

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