I got 400 signups with a video of a product that didn’t exist
lunadio.com
lunadio.com
Proving that fraud has taken place requires the perpetrator to have committed specific acts. First, the perpetrator has to provide a false statement as a material fact. Second, the perpetrator had to have known that the statement was untrue. Third, the perpetrator had to have intended to deceive the victim. Fourth, the victim has to demonstrate that it relied on the false statement. And fifth, the victim had to have suffered damages as a result of acting on the intentionally false statement.
Look at the https://www.tesla.com/cybertruck ... They even collect money, but we are not sure if the whole company Tesla will be here in 2 months. Can we trust that companies will show us only super functioning thing?
But there are of course ethical lines. Here's an interesting read: https://www.mironov.com/lying/
I'm creating an open source todo list + calendar webapp (https://getartemis.app, source at https://github.com/satvikpendem/artemis) made by just me, and I can tell you how I approached the problem. The video you see on the front page does not exist in code, it is simply a prototype designed with Figma (https://figma.com) and animated with Principle (https://principleformac.com). I created the landing page and video, added a Mailchimp form, and I posted on Twitter, Reddit, and here on Hacker News, the communities in which it made sense. For me, it's a productivity / task management tool, so I would post on reddit.com/r/getdisciplined or reddit.com/r/productivity.
It's all about creating a minimum viable product, as you might well be aware, but what you may not know is that an MVP need not have code. Indeed, it could be a video as I did, and I think for software, a video works best as people can actually see what it looks and feels like, without you necessarily creating the product architecture (full frontend and backend plus devops etc). Now I have over 150 subscribers (edit: now 1100 as of July 2020) in only a month due to rapid creation of this type of MVP, and based on this feedback, I changed my designs, and only now I am beginning to really create the heart of the product.
Using non-code MVPs is the best way in my opinion to sell quickly before building.
What I did was a "fake door" MVP, as the article states. It is not necessarily intended for directly measuring sales but whether its worth my time to build it in the first place. Having over a thousand sign-ups now, it validates that I should indeed spend my time on it.
Then, I would make a high fidelity one, a "one feature" MVP as the article calls it, which would cut the product down to its essence and see if it can still solve a specific problem, and whether people would still pay for only one feature. I am doing this now with a mobile app instead of web/desktop app as the reduced screen space forces me to think about the problem of time block productivity from its essence.
Perhaps your definitions of MVP are different than others, which is perfectly fine. There are others I've seen over the years like simple, lovable, complete (products), and so on (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955085).
That he's denying this proves your point.
/shrug
> You're twisting the meaning of the words in the acronym. I really don't care, but it renders the words meaningless to use them that way.
Again, I'm not sure how to explain that MVP does not literally mean an actual product. It's a tool for hypothesis testing, you don't spend time and energy building out your entire product before you show something to customers, that would be a waste of time and energy. That's why I, and others, define MVP as anything that let's you understand something new about your market and eventually you use that knowledge to make a product.
It feels wrong to me, but I think it puts me on the same side as those that reply "but there's a server still" on serverless discussions. As much as I may dislike the naming, that's what it means.
Here’s the definition of an MVP: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product
> , the term MVP is commonly used, either deliberately or unwittingly, to refer to a much broader notion ranging from a rather prototype-like product to a fully-fledged and marketable product.[9]
The summary section of that article and the elaboration is correct and the portion you pulled out is just an explanation of a non-normative minority practice. The same goes for the other end that reserves the term for an essentially mature product, although for different reasons, since the minimum to actually put features in the hands of paying users can be debated whereas users cannot use a lack of features.
No, that their initial landing page and video is regularly talked about as an MVP. Here's a 2011 article on it: https://techcrunch.com/2011/10/19/dropbox-minimal-viable-pro...
And here's Eric Ries http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/08/minimum-viable-...
> First, a definition: the minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.
> Some caveats right off the bat. MVP, despite the name, is not about creating minimal products
The theologian in me says this person writes about/to god frequently and thus treats words like "you" as a capitalized proper noun so frequently that it's autocorrected.
The rationalist in me says English is not their first language and spends most of their time writing in their native language which may include different noun forms and so is habitual. And given some spacing and punctuation oddities, possibly an older person.
My money is on the rational explanation.
1. What problem are you trying to solve?
2. Who has those problems?
3. Where exactly are they located, both physically or in cyberspace?
Based on your conversation rate, you are probably doing a shotgun approach or not talking to the people you need to be.
Second, based on these answers, do things that don't scale (http://paulgraham.com/ds.html). Actually talk to your customers and figure out what problems they have, and what solutions you can give them. In many user interviews, customers will try to give you solutions but that's not their job, their job is to identify their problems, yours is the job to fix them.
Such product exists: Alibaba Luban. It was announced back in 2016 and here's a real world generated example of it:
https://www.bilibili.com/read/cv59884/
There's few demo GIFs show how text and picture align differently in position with different size of layout.
Product page (in Chinese):
some blogs
https://www.alibabacloud.com/blog/alibaba-luban-ai-based-gra...
https://www.alibabacloud.com/blog/the-evolution-of-luban-in-...
If you see, Bannersnack basically do the same thing, problem is, that they don't have that reach functionalities as Photoshop has.
Thanks for sharing anyway, good to know! :)
+ I haven't collected any money from people.
What would you say on Kickstarters? When they are just in "prototype" phase and they even not sure if they can deliver? And they are even collecting money.
I get tired of these startups thinking they can just throw up videos of non-existent products and get signups as some kind of validation.
Consumers patience will wear thin when they find pretty much every new startup pulls the same crap, until interest in new startups reaches all time lows and this strategy doesn’t work anymore.
Then the only way to validate things will be the old fashioned way: take a risk and build shit up front. If it doesn’t sell that’s your problem, the consumer doesn’t care. Not everyone is entitled to cheap and easy validation.
Don’t fake, just make.
Why? I'd suggest they take it one step further: Offer discounted pre-orders and use that to measure if people are interested. The only way to be sure that someone is willing to pay for what you're building is to ask them to pay for it.
> Then the only way to validate things will be the old fashioned way: take a risk and build shit up front.
This is bad advice. You should never take on risk that you don't have to. A startup is full of anticipated and unanticipated risks, there is no reason to expose yourself to even more.
For reference, we tried your approach at my first startup. We built something people found really cool but that no one wanted to pay for. We wasted eight months doing this.
Our next product was launched with minimal tech investment (1-2 weeks of development) and accepted pre-orders. We made $x,xxx this way and things went very well. If we hadn't sold enough we would have refunded all of our pre-orders and chose to work on something that people actually wanted.
Startups though don’t want to build shit. They want to pass on the risk of a failed product to the consumer. They’ll get consumers hopes up and then say “whoops, not enough people wanted this so we’re not building it too bad”
This is also why even if you do build something people might not even use it until you reach a certain level of success because consumers don’t want to invest time and money into some product that can disappear overnight.
There's nothing fake about this though. I work at a thriving startup and we share videos of upcoming features and prototypes with customers and prospects pretty regularly.
Ultimately, we want to build the product our customers want and our customers want us to build them a product they want. This type of stuff lets us iterate significantly more quickly.
A designer can mockup complex features in hours/days. Dev time would be days/weeks. In a week, we can iterate with a customer to get them a feature they want. It'd take months to "just make it" and get to the same point.
me too.
It triggered myself into pondering whether or not humanity will ever actually become less responsive to advertising as a whole simply because of previous experience -- but then I brushed the notion aside, figuring that advertisement psychology is more-or-less all-powerful.
Feels a little odd using a massively successful example from a decade ago, with it still being used as a technique with success to say patience will wear thin.
Imagine a world where every new product you see may or may not exist, because validation tests are rampant. Until you’re actually using the product yourself you’ll never trust that it’s real.
These types of info/notes will high likely give you the list of possible future buyer using the forms like "Add to wish-list","Be the first one to know when we release".
It’s not lying, it’s “hustle”.
There’s ways to present that aren’t outright deceptive.
It’s a strange blog post because it’s not an admission to be proud of.