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Comment by CharlieDigital | Hacker News Reader

    > For example I'm building something cool, a no-code visual regression tool.

Make sure you do your research on what's already out there, how much they charge, who their target market is (startups? Mid market? Enterprise?), what's their marketing strategy, etc.

Basically understand how your solution fits into that market and how you'll differentiate and make money.

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These come up every few weeks on HN. Something something Playwright, something GPT something.

I fully agree that you should try to sell the thing first, because a good chunk of the people who might want such a tool could already have the savvy required to bolt together the relevant open source and off the shelf building blocks.

Even before getting any sort of demo/landing page up?

Yes. The more excited someone else is about an idea, the stronger the signal. The more you have to show them the idea, the weaker the signal (with exceptions at the edges)

That's fair but I need a job so this demo is a perfect way to showcase all of my skills and to add something recent to my portfolio. Maybe if I have like a year of runway and no money stress I can try the pre-sell thing.

Do it for your portfolio; keep it open source. Use a license that's conducive to OSS and possibly a paid version in the future or dual license later.

Just be realistic with your expectations and don't quit your job until you know that there are customers willing to pay.

I haven't worked in over a year and I'm in dire straights. I'll do the OSS version later.

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