Lots of people would be willing to do lots of things for lots of money until you actually give them the opportunity to do so. It's easy to spend hypothetical money.
When this kept happening I realised the only thing that matters in sales is... actually making sales. Everything else is window dressing.
A dozen catering trays of salad get tossed into compost.
All the fried chicken is gone in less than 5 minutes.
For instance, I think it would probably be fair for you to sell your car for the blue book value... but I'm not offering to buy your car. I don't need another.
Were you asking them to open their wallet and hand you 5 dollars and that's it, or were you asking them to go to an unfamiliar website, click around, enter their credit card information, and then spend time learning how to use the software, and do it all right now?
It's all really dumb and obvious in hindsight.
I wonder if the use of a Sales Website facade is more accurate about this -- by this I mean the practice of setting up a sales site before the product is ready, solely to count how much of your traffic converts. It's not an uncommon practice and I'm guessing it would give a more accurate estimate than simply asking "would you pay for this?" merely as a hypothetical.
Essentially the observation was the same. A person claiming they'd buy something is worthless information. He had some strategies for getting around it that I've long since forgotten.
It's apparently not on archive.org yet. I just dropped my copy into my next donation box. It'll be there eventually now.
The term he used was "pretotyping" that term will probably yield everything you need.
People always choose hypothetical money as it's a wildcard, even if in actuality they will spend ridiculous amounts of it on the thing you are testing in the first place.
The existence of hypothetical money in surveys screws them up terribly, as people are both willing to spend and accept hypothetical money in ways that often don't translate to reality.
Money is only a tiny corner of the issue.