Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

This is world's better than discovering, post-launch, on the first time you talk to an actual customer, that the customer has no need for the product. I would caution you, though, that finding someone who won't buy the product is not the same as proving people won't buy the product.

I could go to any teaching forum right now and find you thirty people who won't pay for Bingo Card Creator, and/or think it is a sin to charge poor little teachers $30 when they only make $60,000 a year and have to buy their own paper. This isn't maximally relevant to the business, because I can constructively prove that there exists an addressable channel to sufficient teachers who will pay that make it viable (on BCC's scale, at any rate).

This is one reason why I really like MVPs, by the way. You can often get a close approximation of an actual customer acquisition strategy running on them. Then, see if they'd take at least some action which suggests willingness to pay. ("I can't find the buy button. Where is the buy button!?" has worked for me, at least once.)

I second MVPs. The customer acquisition strategy is usually harder than the actual application. I am guessing, and patio11 can back me up if he agrees, that it is much harder to get a teacher to your site in a cost effective manner and then get them to pay than it is to write an application that randomizes a set of words and prints them out.

By concentrating on the hard part you don't waste time doing the usually easier straight forward part you're already skilled at doing, only to find the part (marketing) you know nothing about doesn't work at all.

I don't mean to sound preachy; it's just that I've made this mistake and I don't want anyone else to if they can avoid it.

I am guessing, and patio11 can back me up if he agrees, that it is much harder to get a teacher to your site in a cost effective manner and then get them to pay than it is to write an application that randomizes a set of words and prints them out.

It is harder to get a couple hundred thousand teachers on your site than to write an application. It isn't terribly difficult to get a couple of hundred on the site, or a couple dozen to use the application, or a couple to use the application with you staring over their shoulder.

I particularly like organic SEO / AdWords as early channels, because if you can prove they work in microscale, they typically won't totally break down right after microscale. (Obviously, BCC isn't going to Facebook scales.) i.e. if you can reliably turn $1 into $2 you can probably turn $1,000 into > $1,000.

Thanks for your valuable feedback! Its quite true, that just because I haven't found anybody _yet_ who say they will pay for my product, that those people are not out there. I guess it always comes down to a very subjective decision as to if you should continue with a product.

However, as the man with the 30k of code and no customers said in his post, its easy to find people who say they will pay for something. So when I started asking my target market if they would buy my app, I expected at least a few "yes's". I was surprised by the strength of the negative reaction. It seems that while there a small unmet need in my area, my features and proposed MVP are way off. Instead I would have to create something that doesn't quite suit me, and would be a much more difficult product to create - all to capture a market that suddenly looks a lot smaller that I thought it was.

BTW, I really like the idea of a MVP. My next step, if I had received a positive response, would have been to create mockups and then re-confirm with my target market that it's what they are after. After that I would take a week or two to create a MVP and then iterate fast from there.

As it is, I have a few other ideas apart from my photo app. Next I'm going to try looking for people who want to integrate google analytics with paypal "buy now" buttons and seeing if any of them would consider paying for an easy solution.

Also: Patio11. Wow, now I am all star struck :-) Your feedback does mean a lot to me!

Can you please tell us (who don't know) what is MVP?

MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product. It's a term coined by Eric Ries to describe the most minimal version of your product that will provide useful feedback. What constitutes an MVP depends on your marketing and business strategy. For a product like Patio11's, it's probably a landing page with a 'buy' button. For a social network, it's probably a rudimentary prototype. The job of an MVP is to help you find out as cheaply as possible whether people actually want your idea.

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