I canceled the project: A success story of talking to your potential customers | Hacker News Reader

I canceled the project: A success story of talking to your potential customers

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51 pointsluke_s38 comments

This is world's better than discovering, post-launch, on the first time you talk to an actual customer, that the customer has no need for the product. I would caution you, though, that finding someone who won't buy the product is not the same as proving people won't buy the product.

I could go to any teaching forum right now and find you thirty people who won't pay for Bingo Card Creator, and/or think it is a sin to charge poor little teachers $30 when they only make $60,000 a year and have to buy their own paper. This isn't maximally relevant to the business, because I can constructively prove that there exists an addressable channel to sufficient teachers who will pay that make it viable (on BCC's scale, at any rate).

This is one reason why I really like MVPs, by the way. You can often get a close approximation of an actual customer acquisition strategy running on them. Then, see if they'd take at least some action which suggests willingness to pay. ("I can't find the buy button. Where is the buy button!?" has worked for me, at least once.)

I second MVPs. The customer acquisition strategy is usually harder than the actual application. I am guessing, and patio11 can back me up if he agrees, that it is much harder to get a teacher to your site in a cost effective manner and then get them to pay than it is to write an application that randomizes a set of words and prints them out.

By concentrating on the hard part you don't waste time doing the usually easier straight forward part you're already skilled at doing, only to find the part (marketing) you know nothing about doesn't work at all.

I don't mean to sound preachy; it's just that I've made this mistake and I don't want anyone else to if they can avoid it.

I am guessing, and patio11 can back me up if he agrees, that it is much harder to get a teacher to your site in a cost effective manner and then get them to pay than it is to write an application that randomizes a set of words and prints them out.

It is harder to get a couple hundred thousand teachers on your site than to write an application. It isn't terribly difficult to get a couple of hundred on the site, or a couple dozen to use the application, or a couple to use the application with you staring over their shoulder.

I particularly like organic SEO / AdWords as early channels, because if you can prove they work in microscale, they typically won't totally break down right after microscale. (Obviously, BCC isn't going to Facebook scales.) i.e. if you can reliably turn $1 into $2 you can probably turn $1,000 into > $1,000.

Thanks for your valuable feedback! Its quite true, that just because I haven't found anybody _yet_ who say they will pay for my product, that those people are not out there. I guess it always comes down to a very subjective decision as to if you should continue with a product.

However, as the man with the 30k of code and no customers said in his post, its easy to find people who say they will pay for something. So when I started asking my target market if they would buy my app, I expected at least a few "yes's". I was surprised by the strength of the negative reaction. It seems that while there a small unmet need in my area, my features and proposed MVP are way off. Instead I would have to create something that doesn't quite suit me, and would be a much more difficult product to create - all to capture a market that suddenly looks a lot smaller that I thought it was.

BTW, I really like the idea of a MVP. My next step, if I had received a positive response, would have been to create mockups and then re-confirm with my target market that it's what they are after. After that I would take a week or two to create a MVP and then iterate fast from there.

As it is, I have a few other ideas apart from my photo app. Next I'm going to try looking for people who want to integrate google analytics with paypal "buy now" buttons and seeing if any of them would consider paying for an easy solution.

Also: Patio11. Wow, now I am all star struck :-) Your feedback does mean a lot to me!

Can you please tell us (who don't know) what is MVP?

MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product. It's a term coined by Eric Ries to describe the most minimal version of your product that will provide useful feedback. What constitutes an MVP depends on your marketing and business strategy. For a product like Patio11's, it's probably a landing page with a 'buy' button. For a social network, it's probably a rudimentary prototype. The job of an MVP is to help you find out as cheaply as possible whether people actually want your idea.

I disagree with this approach. Without at least a tangible prototype to show someone, asking people whether or not they would pay for a product tells you almost nothing. The natural reaction is to say "no, I don't need that."

If you're not that passionate about the idea, I suppose it's a good excuse to not do it. But if it would be really amazing, most people wouldn't even understand the idea until they had it in their hands.

Well, there's a need of a balance. But it's a good idea to first ask people if they want something you would like to make for them. You are making things for them, so ask them. I don't believe any more in the idea of 'you make it and they will come'. They will come, only if they want it. So asking them is a good way to save yourself wasting a whole lot of time based on your own assumptions.

As somebody that has made many things on the web and never had anybody come, I have to agree :-) These days there is so much noise on the web that I feel you have to be sure your idea really will grab peoples attention.

I agree that its sometimes very hard for people to visualize what you are proposing. One screen shot does go a long way. If there had been a more positive response my next step would be to create mockups and re-confirm with my target market that I am on the right track.

However, I'm not so sure that peoples natural reaction is to say "I don't need that" ... personally if I'm in a forum and I see something that is of no interest to me, I'm far more likely just to move onto something more interesting, than to leave a comment. Before starting my little experiment, I was actually expecting things to be biased the other way: eg, people would say "sure, that sounds great, I would buy it" and then when push came to shove not actually buy.

The author has a point, and it's quite possible his idea wasn't worth pursuing further.

This said, a few points should be made:

1. A picture is worth a thousand words. It shouldn't be assumed that individuals you poll about ideas and abstract product features understand them the way you intend them to. You might simply be describing features in a way that doesn't make sense to them, for instance. This is why wireframes and simple prototypes are so valuable.

2. You need a quality sample to make intelligent guesses about the viability of a new product. You should not immediately assume that if you query 10 people about your idea and all 10 shoot it down you are not on to something. Most businesses that are very profitable aren't convincing nine out of 10 (or even five out of 10) potential customers to buy their products. Keep this in mind.

3. Just because your initial product concept (or implementation for that matter) isn't viable doesn't mean that the problem that led you to develop the idea doesn't exist. Instead of simply asking folks whether or not they like your product concept, you should also seek to validate that you're trying to solve a real problem. If you can confirm that there's a problem, you may only be a few iterations away from a product concept that has a shot at success.

Bottom line: you don't want to give up on an idea too late, but you shouldn't give up on an idea too soon either.

I really like your bottom line! At the end of the day, it all comes down to a really subjective subjective judgment on if you should proceed.

And frankly, I'm not sure that I have all the knowledge or experience to be making the right decision. May people in this thread raised some very good counter points and undoubtedly have more experience and knowledge than I.

However at this stage, I think I'll go away and test out the target market for a few other ideas I have and see what kind of response I get. I think I could do with a few more data points on what kind of response to expect from the "talk to your target market" approach.

I wonder how far DropBox would have gotten if he'd gone on Reddit and asked people if it was something that they might want? It was the video that sold it.

I think his concept to test before coding is right, but if he'd shown people a video of his idea (even if it was totally mocked up) he might have gotten a totally different reaction.

Programmers because we have plenty of practice are pretty good at taking ideas and envisioning them as completed software. In other words we're good at connecting the dots. But that's something the general public cannot do - they've got to see it.

You make a couple of really good points - programmers are much better at visualizing how a solution would work than the general public. Also, sometimes people really, really just don't know what they actually want :-)

However on the flip side if people can't understand what I am proposing or why they would want it, it means I am going to have a much harder time selling it to them. Suddenly my task is not about coding and marketing but more about first building the market, so I can then sell to it. Its probably a good opportunity for somebody, but I'm not sure that person is me :-)

I have never seen the Dropbox video. I think it was word of mouth. You can explain it to your friends in a few words and thats what is key.

you can't ask...people will never give you a straight answer.

the best approach is to build a mockup that has the signup and intro pages, and a non-functional signup page(i.e. don't store credit cards)...then run $500 worth of adwords through the site and see if anyone bites.

if $500 is too much, stop thinking that. Building out the feature set to make the site functional would take you quite a bit of time...even if you only "charge' yourself the minimum wage, you'll still end up wasting more "money".

I've always wondered about the ethics of this approach. How would I feel if someone told me they're provide an awesome service, took my credit card number and then told me the whole thing was some sort of "customer development exercise"? Personally, I think I'd be a little miffed. Especially if I really needed that service, or was otherwise "counting on it." In the worst case, I might assume the whole thing was a scam to collect credit cards.

Has anyone done this before? If so, did you find that people were generally supportive, or ticked off?

I think the idea is to get them to the point where you would take their credit card number, and instead say that you're developing the product and ask them if they want to leave their email address. That's how I've read these experiments in the past. Taking someone's credit card number without the intention of selling them something feels fraud-like.

Even if they don't take my credit card number, a service which only tells me on the second or third page that they will launch "soon" feels scammy to me. I'm annoyed rather than interested, at the thought of having spent time for something that's non-existing and thus worthless to me at the moment.

Well, a mockup would have been my next step, if I had received a more positive response at this stage. However it became obvious right away, that my feature set was wrong and I had miss judged how big the market was.

I think the ad-words are a good idea though. I'll have to keep this idea in mind for future projects. How 'obvious' do you think I should be on my landing page, that there is actually no product though? Do I just land to a big 'coming soon' sign, with a field for people to enter their e-mails? Or should I try and create a fully functional site and just say on the purchase page that the product is coming soon and allow people to leave their e-mail.

I just don't get why people are so obsessed with customer feedback in advance of shipping, because it is usually useless. People are fickle, insensitive, and generally don't know themselves as well as they think they do. They are quick to say they would or wouldn't use something without any real thought because talk is cheap (free in fact) while their money is not. This seems to be the same phenomenon driving entrepreneurs to build products that are deemed totally useless once they are out in public- they don't know themselves or the perceived problem as well as they think they do. They think they would use their own product, but start building before really trying to understand the pain point and figuring out why it exists and how it came to exist. I think the best way to approach a startup is the Steve Jobs method of building something that you yourself really wish existed. Much easier said than done for sure, but who ever said building a successful business is easy?

If you have a vision for something, it is impossible to translate to a customer in any meaningful way short of actually building a version of it and trying to sell it to them.

What will you do when, in a few months, someone does the exact same thing you thought about and becomes a billionaire?

I dunno? What do _you_ do when it happens :-)

Seriously though, probably just buy their app and congratulate them on a job well done. There are way more good ideas under the sun, than there is time to develop them. If somebody else can make a good go of this one, then good luck to them.

+1. I agree both with the OP and your comment. For every guy who drops his project, it is very likely that someone will pick up the same project and turn it into a smashing success. This is why you always hear people say "Man I had the same idea x years ago".

In the past 7 months alone this happened to me 3 times with code I actually wrote and that is sitting on my machine, granted the code is only 5% of building a company.

Yes! I love this. Thank you for telling it in a succinct and human way.

I'm going to bookmark this and send people to it often.

I get lots of emails from people wanting to know what I think of their business idea. 99% of the time it's a business that I would never use. (I don't have an iPhone or iPad. I'm not looking to share things online with friends. Etc.)

I tell them to just ask their potential customers, not me. But your post describes it much better. Thanks for writing it.

Thanks! I think at the end of the day, the only opinion which really, matters is that of the person who will be spending the money.

I think it depends on what you are and what your idea is. If you're a developer and it's a product you can have a prototype built for in a small amount of time (say 1 or 2 weeks) then just fucking do it but obviously if you're a business development person who needs to contract out you have to approach it differently. However the way people articulate ideas matters a lot, so unless you're 100% confident in your ability to articulate ideas then I can see this being the cause of missed opportunities.

If I have an idea I believe will work well, I build it, if it fails it fails, asking people isn't something I'd base the choice to make or not make something on just because the people I know is limited, there is always someone out there who will use your product (even if it's just you) it's a big gamble to assume those you asked is representative of that group.

Its a good idea in some cases, but unfortunately I don't have two weeks to create a prototype. I'm actually trying to get together a minimum viable product, and launch in a few months of long weekends I have free, while my family is overseas.

There's a certain nuance on how to ask the questions about a possible product that your attempting to build and what part of the feedback you should listen to.

If your new to this kind of thing, you'll mostly hear what you want to hear. An example would be the focus group study that was done for the aeron chair - no one wanted it.

To learn from people doing customer development in the field and for clarifying your own experience I would recommend http://groups.google.com/group/lean-startup-circle/topics?pl... .

Also follow SK Murphy's blog. He seems to have this down to a science when building B2B applications.

If you had launched MVP and asked feedback on that, it would have been more accurate. Optimize your time/energy towards validating your idea via MVP. If it takes less than 4 weeks to validate an idea, my bet would be go for it.

I wouldn't listen to people who didn't want it. They don't count. There are MILLIONS of people who don't want your product.

I wish I had a nickel for every time someone has pitched an idea on a website and the people shot it down, but he wrote it anyhow and it turned out to be a huge success.

Instead, listen to the ones who DO want it. They are the paying customers. It is their interest that will make the project a success.

I didn't see that he got any 'great idea!' replies, but he might have just left them out because they didn't improve the story. We don't know.

Sometimes it's difficult for the users to see your vision before it's built, and they would reject your idea prematurely. Sometimes the users don't know better beforehand but love the product once they use it, especially for something brand new. It's a rare skill to communicate your vision precisely in words.

"smashing success". You have to love this guy. He succeed in not wasting time on a project that his audience does not want. Kudos.

On the other side, though, what would have happened if JD went around and asked about Twitter or Zuck did customer development before writing FB?

You're right - the customer development model/ethos would have failed in identifying Twitter or FB.

However, that's probably ok as Twitter and FB are outliers. I'm not sure setting out to build the next FB or Twitter is a a prudent "strategy" either - more of a prayer.

Or ask people in the 90's do they need another search engine.

I think you would have gotten a resounding yes on this one.

"Would you be intersted in a seaarch engine that is much better at finding the content your actually looking for?" is a yes every time.

Twitter: "A free version of SMS, based on the web" - yeah, I think people would have wanted that.

Facebook: When Zuck wrote Facebook, there had already been multiple letters-to-the-editor in the Harvard magazine asking to put the facebook (lowercase - the orignal paper based version) online. His FaceMash project had shown him the demand for social web applications was real.

what if they were not your target users? I would never close down a potential project by asking just a bunch of forum users. Maybe people who would pay never hang out in forums. They always google for their needs. You should run a campaign in google adwords and see how many hits you are getting. Then you can decide if you want to close the project or not. The verdict is still out IMHO

Nilesh http://www.mockuptiger.com

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