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Comment by vaksel | Hacker News Reader

you can't ask...people will never give you a straight answer.

the best approach is to build a mockup that has the signup and intro pages, and a non-functional signup page(i.e. don't store credit cards)...then run $500 worth of adwords through the site and see if anyone bites.

if $500 is too much, stop thinking that. Building out the feature set to make the site functional would take you quite a bit of time...even if you only "charge' yourself the minimum wage, you'll still end up wasting more "money".

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I've always wondered about the ethics of this approach. How would I feel if someone told me they're provide an awesome service, took my credit card number and then told me the whole thing was some sort of "customer development exercise"? Personally, I think I'd be a little miffed. Especially if I really needed that service, or was otherwise "counting on it." In the worst case, I might assume the whole thing was a scam to collect credit cards.

Has anyone done this before? If so, did you find that people were generally supportive, or ticked off?

I think the idea is to get them to the point where you would take their credit card number, and instead say that you're developing the product and ask them if they want to leave their email address. That's how I've read these experiments in the past. Taking someone's credit card number without the intention of selling them something feels fraud-like.

Even if they don't take my credit card number, a service which only tells me on the second or third page that they will launch "soon" feels scammy to me. I'm annoyed rather than interested, at the thought of having spent time for something that's non-existing and thus worthless to me at the moment.

Well, a mockup would have been my next step, if I had received a more positive response at this stage. However it became obvious right away, that my feature set was wrong and I had miss judged how big the market was.

I think the ad-words are a good idea though. I'll have to keep this idea in mind for future projects. How 'obvious' do you think I should be on my landing page, that there is actually no product though? Do I just land to a big 'coming soon' sign, with a field for people to enter their e-mails? Or should I try and create a fully functional site and just say on the purchase page that the product is coming soon and allow people to leave their e-mail.

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