The cheapest way to discover if a startup idea will make money

maxkle.in

7 points·haraball··4 comments

Genuinely good advice, but the prose wrapped around it is tedious and over-wrought. I think a lot of people will tl;dr this, so (spoiler alert!) the advice is basically to use Twitter to validate ideas by seeing if you get a follow-back rate of more than 10% from people in your target audience.

It's sort of an interesting story. I think it does a good job of setting the tone: guy makes enough money in a short enough amount of time to (he believes) warrant excessive drug use. The payoff is interesting though (the Twitter idea). Most articles about validating startup ideas give really vague guidelines for doing it yourself. This way adds more noise to Twitter but it's easily do-able by anyone with a little free time.

Vaguely interesting but completely unrelated. I expected "the secret" to be that this guy dressed in drag and talked up guys at the bar to spill their secrets. Needless to say, I was very disappointed when the "secret" was using Twitter as a testing ground.

Personally, I don't think that twitter is the best measure. Given the amount of noise and the whole follow back culture, you might just end up getting the 1/10 person who ends up following everyone.

I think if you are going to use twitter, have something interesting to say about the area where your startup is based in - that will attract initial early adopters and those who are passionate about the space.

Also, I do feel if you have some JS, CSS knowledge, go out and actually build a landing page - see if people actually sign up to what the product will be (or could be) - that's a much better way to gain traction and email addresses for those who could end up being your early adopters.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com