jamesskarzynski

Absolutely! The more value you can provide the customer the better.

These are some good ideas, thanks! Eventually (read: once we have other monetization channels) we are planning on swapping the core functionality to be completely free, but in the meantime I'll give some thought to how our pricing model could be improved.

Absolutely! You can use it for whatever you want, as long as you credit it. What monetization model do you think would work better?

If anyone has any questions or would like clarification on any step, just comment here!

Thanks! This is actually the reason I made it. I have about 50 ideas in the back of my head and don't want to muck about making a different site / validation flow for each one.

Sure, if you can provide one!

We were actually debating between this and the way we went. We are planning on adding custom domain support in the future!

Sure, I can see that. But the application of this is such that you can expand it to include whatever sort of validation you need. When you get a list of people who imagine their future best self as being interested, you now have a list of people to whom you can more rigorously validate with. You can send them all an email asking for an interview, pre-order, etc. But regardless, this helps you build that initial list.

Thanks! This is something we're working on as we speak.

Thanks for the input! Sorry you feel that way. I don't think I'd agree with your sentiment. I think it's a bad idea to build a whole product and spend potentially months or years before even knowing if people like your product.

Thanks so much!

I'm sorry to hear about that, but it is a really funny product idea looking back on it. Glad you see the value in our product!

This is a great idea! Right now this can be accomplished fairly easily by simply making a landing page for each group that you post in. For example, one of our users has 4 pages, with the slug of each ending with -{{group}}. This way you can collect emails and get vote info based on certain groups like you said.

Thanks John!

Thanks so much! I worked really hard on it and I was lucky to have some codebase that I could reuse from another project.

Totally agree. To add onto this, there are very few ideas that are so inherently new and valuable that simply hearing about them would cause someone else to launch into competition with you.

Thank you! Hope it helps

Thanks! I appreciate it

Thanks! The pricing page should be updated now, thanks for letting us know!

You'll need to validate at some point! We don't publicly display any of our user's ideas, so your idea can stay as private or be as public as you want. If you just want to validate with a few people, just sent it to a few people!

You're right. This is why (as they said in the article) there aren't any massive players in the market. It's viable if you have a few machines in your area that you restock as a hobby, but the minute you add in any sort of overhead, your margins will dry up immediately. Plus, the numbers in the article are actually a little high. 25% margins or less are more common, and generally a single machine will only bring a few hundred or less per month in profit.

I tried this a few years ago and I can really attest to just how awful an idea buying a used machine is. I found a decent condition one on craigslist for $100. I bought it, and it's been stuck in my garage for 2 years now. I must have gone through $200 of parts just trying to get the bill collector to work, and it still doesn't. It would be at least a few hundred more to bring it to a place that can fix it. If you're thinking about doing this, you need to make sure that every part of the machine works, because if you're just starting out I can guarantee that you won't be able to do the maintenance yourself.