Comment by timmm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by timmm | Hacker News Reader

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Or alternatively instead of testing the market with the mindset of absolute consumer naivety.... and the fact that in this industry it's much easier to make a bet that your comfortable with and then just putting it out there and see. No amount of market research will tell you that an iPad was a good idea for a product. Likewise I don't need any market research to know that a teleporting machine would be a good idea.

Learn how to understand what has value. Build things for yourself that you find valuable and sell those things.

I've never done market research and I sure as hell don't ask my customers for feedback. I just build things I want and it turns out I'm almost never alone, the question then becomes a matter of just how much other people want it. But again this is all predicated on the idea that you actually know what is a good idea for a product (which I believe many people do know).

Thanks, but ya I've already spoken with people and they are asking to start paying for this.

I was more focused on how you might go about equity splits

Sure, there are some things that obviously have value... the oft-cited example being "a cure for cancer". And maybe some people just have a well developed intuition for what will or won't be in demand.

And, of course, the old saw about "If Henry Ford had asked his customers what they want, they'd have said 'a faster horse'" has some merit to it. There's a place for being a visionary, and if you're really building something visionary, sometimes you have to build it first and then show it to people for them to "get" it.

That said, I argue that for most entrepreneurs, you're not Steve Jobs or Henry Ford (or whoever), you don't have any special intuition about what will or won't be in demand, and market validation is a useful tool in the incipient stages of your project.

Also, the point of making attempts to validate a market isn't just about determining "does anybody want this"? It's about determining if enough people want it, if they will pay enough to make it profitable, factoring in the overhead of selling to them, and ascertaining how to best market and sell to that market.

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