Your 'Big Idea' Sucks | Hacker News Reader

Your 'Big Idea' Sucks

techdrawl.com

31 pointsOompa13 comments

I couldn't agree more with the core concept here, which is: if customers haven't told you they'd pay for it (either when asked directly or in the form of giving you money), there's a good chance they're not going to.

...you need to spend as much time talking to prospective customers as you do working on your product...

Better yet, use your customers' day-to-day problems as seeds for your idea. Better to scratch their itch than your own if you can. This would be a huge head start.

Even if you're directly targeting a known issue, it's very possible they won't want to pay for the solution. A tight feedback loop is necessary in damn near every product's development, I believe.

Just today there was this call from the guy behind 'wordoid', textbook case of tight coupling with the customer base. Very interesting to watch, that was his second iteration and he does a fantastic job of it.

EDIT: found the link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=737282

(the 'new' page is currently under attack...).

I must respectfully disagree. You can ask people all day, but unless you put them in front of a product and say click here, then it will be very hard for them to see its value. Otherwise your prospects will be picturing your application in their head, and noone knows how they visualize it.

If you are confident about your product, build a simple prototype in a short amount of time and ship it for feedback.

What you are saying is exactly what Customer Development says to do, so you're agreeing with the post, not disagreeing. Although perhaps I should have been more explicit :) Its all in Steve Blank's book.

Concurrent product development and customer development is the way.

I guess so. The Customer development model (customer discovery > validation > customer creation > company building ) works best when you have a niche market for enterprise applications. If you consider consumer apps, then how do you go out and talk to consumers? "ASK HN:..?". Consumer applications, read free, are doomed to follow the painful "Customer Acquisition and Adoption Model" . In other words how fast do we sign up new users and how much do they use the product.

Eric Ries talks about this at length, for consumer internet companies. Check out the archives at http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/

In short: you can release a landing page before building, with a signup form for interested peeps, and you can release early and often.

Kind of agree, but nothing really new under the sun...

I get tired of writing this shit, but I do so because it seems like its not getting through.

Your 'Blog' Sucks

Your 'Book' Sucks

Your "your X sucks blog post" sucks.

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