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Comment by ptero | Hacker News Reader

This is a very good post. I am in special agreement with #2 (on listening).

However, #1 for me is not quite right. Selling before building anything may backfire as your prospects could see you as an airhead selling vaporware. "OK, this tech looks useful, but so is anti-gravity. Show me that it is buildable and that your team can build it quickly."

One way to allay such concerns is to have a quick prototype that (on a logarithmic scale) is halfway to the product you are selling. This can say "yes, we do not have a product for you today (because we did not focus on it yet), but we can build it quickly". Would this be something you are interested in? My 2c.

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> One way to allay such concerns is to have a quick prototype

Once you've discovered a need for a potential product, this is the most important bit. You should spend as little time as possible trying to build the MVP.

It's really important to stick to the 'minimum' and not over-engineer it. That means if you have the choice of using ML that will take 6 months to build, or you can build it in a month and then spend 12 hours a day juggling spreadsheets, you should do the later.

Once you get to market, and (hopefully) have real customers paying you, you'll discover much more valuable insights than you ever could just by talking to prospects up front.

Right, but, you'll tell a new customer you will have the product ready for them quickly, but because you didn't have a stakeholder that would, you're running the risk trying to sell them a product that wouldn't solve their particular problem (feature mismatch).

Maybe if you believe the limits of technology would be a blocker to solving your customer's vision of their problem, then a prototype before you have a stakeholder that would compensate you somehow is probably the right answer.

But I think you can easily confuse the business objectives with engineering objectives in making the assumption that the prototypical solution is representative of the customer's vision of the solution.

It's not that I think you or a business can't live with that dissonance, I think it may open you up to that problem.

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