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Comment by l5870uoo9y | Hacker News Reader

Properly want to vet ideas a bit before executing.

Bad idea, for a bunch of reasons, the largest being the fact that your "vetting" process is at best a very rough facsimile of reality.

Quick, iterative feedback is by far a superior approach when attempting to understand how to build a successful product.

Considering the amount of success and audience he's reached with this I'd say he's done just fine.

I actually agree with this. There are a bunch of low-cost ways to prototype and collect user feedback. The paper notebook idea could have started with surveying people and finding if anyone actually existed who say it would be useful and they would pay for it. Or even just launch a one-page product site with an email sign-up list to get notified when the alpha version releases and wait until it reached some critical mass. All of this would have taken less investment than actually building it first lol.

> It's a paradox, but I've found that my best ideas now come from building other ideas.

Building and failing and building and failing might be a faster way of getting to something great than vetting, vetting, vetting, building, vetting, vetting building...

You have to, at the very least, vet the problem domain first though, no?

Building hundreds of AviSynth filters won't bring in a cent.

Part of this is learning from the “failures”. If you are building AviSynth filter #742, then maybe you are skipping that step.

On the other hand, if you are having fun and learning something along the way, who cares?

It’s only faster if you have the skills personally to build (which is many, but not all, HN users). If you don’t then vetting is a better place to start.

Depends on how much time you plan on putting into it and if it sounds like fun. Most people have a bit of free time to spend on side projects, even if they're silly.

Or if you're going to learn something new. I do side projects when I want to learn websockets or something like that. Even when the project doesn't go anywhere, I got something out of it.

‘Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work.’

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