I like to live by the motto:
You never know if someone is willing to pay until you ask them to open their checkbook.
The same theory can be applied to most investors. (pre-handshake protocol at least)
You never know if someone is willing to pay until you ask them to open their checkbook.
The same theory can be applied to most investors. (pre-handshake protocol at least)
You throw up a cool pitch with some videos and vague promises, and watch the cash roll in. If the cash does indeed roll in, then it's a good idea!
Then you get to work, and hope no one remembers in 6 months that you promised to deliver them some amazing gifts. :-)
Avoid the confirmation bias of your peers, and target people actively looking for your idea.
Build a fake checkout that collects no data, and thank your 'paying' users for signing up to be notified when X goes on sale.
(You should also probably tell them that no financial information was actually stored.)
Kickstarter seems like a better approach, since everyone KNOWS there is no product to buy.
I still can't bring myself to do it, though.
Are you serious? That's a criminal act called fraud.
Please don't follow this advice. Just do something legal like having users sign up for a mailing list.
Much better to have PPC + landing page and a "tell me when this is available" signup.
Contrast that with polling a random sample of your target demographic, where any number of things can spoil the results. People could say they like the idea just to be polite. People could have never thought about the problem you're solving before, but think it's neat. People can misjudge how much they care about it. People can have an enthusiastic initial reaction, but think the idea is dumb on further reflection.
It's the same sort of problem with polling for election results: you can't ask a whole bunch of random people who they're going to vote for and turn the raw results into a pie chart. To get useful data, you have to carefully predict which of your respondents will actually turn up for the election, and which ones aren't going to change their mind between the time you poll them and voting day. And even then, in the end, it's not the pre-election polls that determine the new leader, it's the election itself.
That distinction is what's being presented here; asking a bunch of people is only useful if you're very careful about filtering out the junk answers. You should instead measure people who have already decided, without your prompting, that they have a problem and have decided to seek out a solution for it.