Comment by WillThisFly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WillThisFly | Hacker News Reader

Man, I feel your pain. I have developed the most awesome products the world has never seen 4 times now. We had a "build it and they will come" attitude too :(

We decided to ask ourselves one question: How to we validate an idea before wasting months on an idea that only we seem to think is cool?

So we are creating WillThisFly? to ask that very question... it's a site that allows you to try out your ideas and projects, get feedback and refine them before committing resources to it.

Shameless plug: http://willthisfly.net (Just launched last night)

Only thing on there at the moment is WTF? itself.

All I can say is, it has happened to probably everyone at one stage in their startup career... don't give up, refine your ideas, create MVP's and keep trying...

Excellent initiative. I'll check it. I hope you will also provide some general talks on strategies we could use to test this as early as possible.

Sometime it just need a few more optimization iterations. Considering the Facebook example and prior art, this must be really frustrating for those who missed the gold pot.

The main point of WillThisFly? is to test out an idea or project at any stage of its development before committing too many resources and finding that your awesome idea isn't so awesome after all.

If we had something like this when we first started out it would have made life so much easier and we wouldn’t have wasted months on projects that weren’t going anywhere but may still have been salvageable with the right feedback.

The iterations and feedback are key: This involves a simple, instant method (voting) and the more involved approach (comments). With both of these, a project owner will be able to find out if his project is worth pursuing and if it is, be able to iterate, change or pivot accordingly until he is happy he has a product that will work.

We will be adding a blog shortly that will outline strategies and features and more information about WTF?

At the moment we are using WillThisFly? to develop WillThisFly? and it's early days but it's coming along nicely and we are always open to suggestions :)

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