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Comment by lrobb | Hacker News Reader

There's 2 big ones:

1. Writing code. 2. Not committing.

You should never write a single line of code until you have a customer lined up. Not in theory, in reality. Not a friend that says it's a great idea, and they'd use your software. A list of verifiable people that you don't know that want to pay you money. Someone that can write a check at BigCo. Someone that is beta testing your product live.

On commitment, cue the joke about pig & chicken opening a ham & eggs restaurant: The pig says no thanks, he'd be committed, the chicken would merely be involved. This kind of ties in with #1... If you don't have an actual paying customer lined up, it's really easy to get involved in "side" activities... I'll just bust out this contract real quick... Sounds like a cool company, I'll go interview (especially bad when it involves samples).

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That sounds good on paper but in reality writing code for new product is based on faith. You don't know what will work and figuring that is both the most risky part of writing software as well as most lucrative (when solved).

And the only way to find out if something will sell is to build and try to sell. The method you advocate (get sales before you have a product) just doesn't work.

"A list of verifiable people that you don't know that want to pay you money"

How do you propose to "verify", or even find, people that you don't know?

"Someone that can write a check at BigCo."

Would you write a check for something that doesn't yet exist? How do you know, from just a description of the product, whether it's going to be moral equivalent of Vista (a massive flop by Windows standards) or 7 (a massive success)?

You don't, which is why no one pays for ideas or description of future products.

"Someone that is beta testing your product live."

That does require that code has already been written, doesn't it?

You don't have to actually have a product before you sell it, or build something to see if it will sell... It's called vaporware : a computer-related product that has been widely advertised but has not and may never become available

Don't hate peeps.

It's called "Minimum Viable Product" now, but 15 years ago we called it vaporware.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product

The canonical MVP strategy for a web application is to create a mock website for the product and purchase online advertising to direct traffic to the site. The mock website may consist of a marketing landing page with a link for more information or purchase. The link is not connected to a purchasing system, instead clicks are recorded and measure customer interest.

That is how you get sales before you have a product... Or at least know that you'll get sales.

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