Validation is a mirage | Hacker News Reader

Validation is a mirage

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3 pointsvladmk14 comments

    If you want to see if something works, make it. The whole thing. The simplest version of the whole thing – that’s what version 1.0 is supposed to be. But make that, put it out there, and learn. If you want answers, you have to ask the question, and the question is: Market, what do you think of this completed version 1.0 of our product?

I think is totally right about the question.

The industry isn't used to breaking the marketeers hype mirages, on the contrary, is used to create new ones with products that fill the void.

Rob Walling says (paraphrasing): "the goal of validation is not to get to 100%. That's not really possible. The point is to reduce uncertainty/risk. You can maybe get to 50-60% at most. The more you do to validate, the better your position is" << this is from one of his recent podcasts but can't remember which.

So I think they are saying the same thing but Jason Fried has a more controversy provoking style

got it - so you should validate, but ultimately it's all a guess makes sense

What do you guys think of this Jason Fried article? It's basically shooting down customer validation...interesting perspective

The title should be in the ask somehow. Ask HN: "validation is a mirage" right? or some such.

ok done :-)

You had it right the first time! Submit the link, then submit your question as a comment in the thread. The title should be the article's original title.

He totally did have it right the first time. :) I'm not sure the timing exactly but I think I posted, came back, & was like, oh no, it's wrong/bad now!

no worries guys it is what it is sometimes they don't get as many upvotes

I appreciate your helping out a fellow user! but that's not the convention for Ask HNs - those are supposed to be text posts, not links, with a question being posed by the submitter. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

Thanks & apologies. I was trying to respect the desire to leave it as an Ask HN, but where we are now seems like a better fit & you're of course right on the FAQ. Thanks again.

> What people are asking about is certainty ahead of time. But time doesn’t start when you start working on something, or when you have a piece of the whole ready. It starts when the whole thing hits the market.

This asking for certainty seems like a strong & resounding central message to me.

I think there's debateable-ness about how much certainty can be gotten ahead of time. There's a lot of other evidence & cause for belief one can try to gather. You can't validate, but you can try to find reasons for your belief. I'm just not sure how valuable the Thomas Aquinas-esque search for cause really is.

> If you want to see if something works, make it. The whole thing.

Basically, yup. For a lot of things, we should be able to "just build it." Especially with software. The cost of finding out for real ought be low enough. You want to not be wasting your time or other people's money but that effort to validate seems daunting & a weak indicator. It's better if you can gather people who do have faith & pursue something earnestly.

It's not impossible to get data faster. At my last job, I had my first real (& intentional) experience of "let's build one, test it, then throw it out". We prototyped something & got data ahead of time about how it compared to what we were doing. We did decide to build the new thing. That was one example of validation: making it twice.

There's still a big effort to launching, which I hope continues to simplify over time. I hope more pieces become readily available. Creating user management systems is no fun. A good backend-as-a-service system is highly desireable here, such as the now retired/atticked Apache BaseGrid[1].

I love how this piece is so only-barely-subtly political. It's trying to set you on a progressive path, on a march forward. It doesn't reject fear uncertainty or doubt, but it deflates the idea that we can really know, unless we try, and it dares us to reach & try. Not to go for half measures, of collecting belief, of trying to outsmart our fear, but to dive forward anyways. It's all so nicely connected to one of my favorite rants, Yegge's Notes from the Mystery Machine[2], which posits:

> "Software engineering has its own political axis, ranging from conservative to liberal."

This is such a liberal attitude. "Make it. The whole thing." Don't let yourself be tattered by concern first. Follow forward.

[1] https://attic.apache.org/projects/usergrid.html

[2] https://gist.github.com/cornchz/3313150

interesting, never thought about it from the political perspective, but is an interesting lens to use.

> "We regard political conservatism as an ideological belief system that is significantly (but not completely) related to motivational concerns having to do with the psychological management of uncertainty and fear."

This whole article is about how & whether to grapple with uncertainty & fear. There's a disposition to try to convince ourselves that the other sciences can give us good data, that research beyond just doing it is good & valuable. Get validation! That's a business cry, from people who believe in business ends. But whether these lo-fi facimilies of data really represent what the real answers are is the question.

This article tries to sell just doing it. But really, it's a hit job against the business types. It's a hit job against the non believers. Either get on the wagon & try for it, or get the heck out. Don't make the process of doing it worse. That's what most searching for validation is. This is entirely an issue of political alignment, of positive versus negative politics.

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