Comment by gruseom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gruseom | Hacker News Reader

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It's surprising to me that in that entire thread, not one person expressed any misgivings about the fact that the author actively deceived his/her customers (indeed practically brags about having done so). This despite the fact that the OP added:

There has been a lot of discussion about what the anonymous poster did right. How about some things that he/she could have done better?

I just joined the group to post that surely he/she could have done better by not lying. But the thread is old and there was no Reply link, which is just as well: it would have been rude to butt in like that.

I've been vaguely aware of this group for a while. I've read several of Eric Ries' posts, I have Steve Blank's book, and I like Steve Blank's blog a lot. The ideas of customer development make a lot of sense. But the above makes me think there's something wrong with this community. I'd rather surround myself with people whose first reaction to something like that is WTF.

Edit: Obviously if the message to the customer had been, "these are just mockups as we figure out what you need," there would be no ethical objection. That's part of what I can't understand. What would have been the problem with just telling the truth?

OP did tell the truth. Your interpretation adds judgment.

The relevant facts to the listener (prospective customer) are:

- "This is a picture of software to buy"

- "This software to buy will solve your problems."

Here is what you added:

- "These are just..." we ourselves do not believe that this software to buy is valuable despite we are here to convince you that this is software to buy is valuable

- "figure out..." we ourselves do not believe that this software to buy will solve your problems despite that we are here to convince you that this software to buy will solve your problems

I don't consider this telling the truth:

"Each time we would come back with a few more 'screenshots' and tell them that development was progressing nicely"

No doubt you could come up with some hair-splitting interpretation under which it wasn't technically lying.

Development of the codebase might not have been but development of the product clearly was.

And the use cases. And the commercial viability of the market so their company had a chance to be around to support their customers. And the business understanding needed to support those customers properly.

Not all development is programming.

Development of the codebase might not have been but development of the product clearly was.

The hair-splitting begins. The phrase "software development" in my book, and I suspect in most people's, implies code. If you just mean any old development, well, sure, the customer development was proceeding quite nicely. Maybe that was what they meant?

Try a simple thought experiment. If the customers learned that there was no code and the product consisted of nothing more than the printed "screenshots" they'd been shown, would they care? I'd guess that one's answer to that is pretty correlated with whether or not one thinks deception was involved here. My answer - not about these particular customers, but in general - is yes, they would care. As a customer, I certainly would. (Not, of course, because of any objection to paper prototyping as such, but because a critical piece of the situation had been hidden from me.)

I'm with mst. It's not lying when you fail to point out the flaws in your own pitch. If the prospect asks, "do these screen shots actually exist in code" and you say "yes", you're a liar; if they don't ask at all, they don't care.

I got a little skeeved out at "development is coming along nicely", just like you, but the solution to that is just to choose better words. They could simply have said "design is coming along nicely", nobody would have cared, and they'd have the exact same outcome. So while you're right that those were unfortunate words, it's hard for me to get too bent out of shape about them.

I can't really argue with that. Blast you.

There isn't enough information in the story to know what was really going on. Some possible contexts are a lot more venial than others. I think what irritated me was just the gloating tone of "we sure put one over on them"... but perhaps they didn't mean it that way.

Deciding which facts are "relevant" to the customer is a pretty dicey proposition: why do you assume that the fact that no code has been written is irrelevant to the customer? Just because the sales guy wants it to be irrelevant doesn't mean that the customer shouldn't have the right to make their decisions based on the actual facts, rather than what's convenient for the seller.

No, if the facts are important to the prospect, the prospect asks about them. I didn't read anything in this post about them supplying false answers to direct questions.

You are not obligated to provide SEC disclosures along with your pitches. I do that, and it's a horrible habit and something I've been trying hard to break. It communicates nervousness and lack of confidence.

Again: you can't just make stuff up. If the prospect asks, "how much of this stuff actually works", you need to be clear --- "we're still in the design phase". But if the prospect doesn't ask, the prospect doesn't care, and you let it go.

Fair enough; you're not obligated to disclose everything up front if they don't ask. But that's a world different from making a deliberately misleading statement.

If someone says "We're actively developing this" I'm not going to just assume I'm being mislead and say, "Sure, but do you have code?" The statement implies an answer to the question, so I'll feel like I already have an answer to the question, and I'd be wrong.

So no, it's not a direct answer to a question, but it's meant to imply an answer to the question so people don't ask anything further. Deliberately attempting to mislead people is just as bad as outright lying in my book, and I can't see the way that statement is worded as anything less than an attempt to mislead the potential customer.

Change the words "actively developing this" to "actively designing this". Can we stop debating it now?

Calling them "screenshots" and using the word "development" both in the present tense when talking to potential customers is telling them implicitly that not only do you have the skills and competency to deliver this functional piece of software, but that you are already in the process of doing so. Unfortunately none of that is actually proven explicitly by what you're showing, as all of the functional coding implied doesn't actually exist.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, if all you've done is paid a designer to give you some visual and functional mockups, well, that means absolutely nothing about your ability to actually code and deliver the product.

Also the fact that they could write the code to support the designs isn't the issue. The issue is that they didn't, and didn't say so. It's giving the impression that they are operating at what seems to be an amazing speed supporting what presumably appears to be a fully fleshed out user experience, etc, when all that exists might be a design/pitch doc and some jpegs. Programmingprowess is implied. Frontend to backend functionality is implied. Progress is implied. When you leave things implied, then blame your customer for not catching the fact that you weren't explicit about details and therefore you weren't lying to them after all, you're doing it wrong.

It's like that episode of Arrested Development where they go to show clients a model home, only to have one of the walls fall down to reveal nothing inside but a bunch of air, and two people who thought they were hiding inside making out.

They may not be lying with this approach -- they do have screenshots, the same way the guys in that sitcom really did have four walls and a roof -- but they're also setting themselves up for a pretty killer "I don't think you've been entirely honest with me" conversation with a client if one of those walls happens to fall over a bit and reveal what's inside.

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