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Comment by Permit | Hacker News Reader

> How the heck do you know what people will want, with any sort of confidence?

One way is to ask them to pay you for it (pre-order) before you make it. For the original Pebble I imagine Kickstarter helped fill this role.

This worked for a startup of mine as well. For our first product we spent ~8 months building and polishing something we thought (hoped) people would like. No one was willing to pay for it. For our second product we spent 3 weeks building an MVP, shot a short video and took preorders. This time enough people put up money to pay for it so we built it!

Personally, I hate pre-ordering things but many other people do not and it’s a really practical way to answer the question “Will people actually pay us money for this thing?”.

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Pre-order is reliable signal. How does one go about software services though?

For the past 2 weeks I've been analyzing a problem & I think my target segment desperately needs a solution (based on discussions on online forums, including HN.) I'm about to begin market research to validate my assumptions & to check if my userbase can actually shell out money.

Presently, I'm thinking of getting some pilot users & offer my service for free (or a small fee, since I'd be doing some non-trivial work for them). If the results seem promising, I'll pitch my idea to others. I've been part of few early stage startups but this is the first time I'm doing something of my own. Is there a better way to do this validation?

Ideally, you don't start building any software until you have a validation. "Soft" validation would mean having people that want to try it, "hard" validation would be preorders. A middle ground might be what Buffer did [1], where they added a fake preorder screen just to see whether people will click on it.

Beware that any kind of "soft" validation may evaporate once you'll try to charge money, so start charging sooner.

[1] https://blog.tally.so/how-to-validate-your-idea-with-tally

But the Pebble blogpost specifically mentions how they were fooled by pre-orders into thinking that they had a popular product !

Definitely read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. It goes over why you shouldn't spend ages on market research and instead just get an MVP out of the door as soon as possible.

One way to validate demand for SaaS without risking too much development time, is to just make a landing page with a sign-up button. If someone clicks the sign-up button, just present them with page that says it's coming soon. Then you can track whether people even click to sign up.

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