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Comment by danenania | Hacker News Reader

A bit of unsolicited advice: before putting money in or pitching to publishers, make a simple static site with a mailing list sign up form, then promote it and run some ads for it.

If you get positive feedback and a bunch of sign ups, proceed. Otherwise iterate on the concept/website/marketing strategy until it clicks, then continue with your plans.

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The static site is already up, but I don't get why I'd buy ads before creating an actual product to show.

I guess you can see a YouTube video of my prototype on the static site ?

The point is just to get some traffic somehow so you can check whether anyone wants to play the game you’re about to spend tons of time and money on. Ads are a simple way to drive some traffic. If you can’t get clicks or sign ups, you will save yourself a really bad time by figuring that out before starting to build, and iterating to a better concept/pitch that is validated by real potential users.

And yeah a prototype video sounds like a great way to test people’s enthusiasm.

Okay, I really need to spend a bit more time before I'd feel comfortable doing that but I'll definitely take your advice to advertise it sooner rather than later.

From reading his comment the goal of the ad spend isn't to get a lot of visitors, but to get enough visitors that you can measure impact. So you don't need a big push, just enough that you can check if people want what you are building and compare again later after you make changes.

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