Comment by steventruong | Hacker News Reader

Comment by steventruong | Hacker News Reader

The best thing you could of done but didn't do would have been to validate the idea before even building it. And by validating, I meant finding a core group of users who absolutely had a need or want for what you were looking to build, not friends or people who thought the idea was cool. This core group would then go on to be your beta (or alpha) users.

I assume you didn't do the above. Virality, press, etc... are often not reliable sources of traffic to build a sustainable group of users in the early stages. At this point, you should go back and find that core group to improve the MVP with and worry about growth once you've worked out all the initial bugs and features users actually want.

Obviously take my advice with a grain of salt as I have no idea what your idea is and just how far you got and this is very general advice (on iPhone and didn't go to your link). You need to make sure people even wants your product

It was mostly "friends or people who thought the idea was cool". The handful people who were most adamant about the idea were somewhat savvy Twitter users, so I envisioned others having the same passion for the idea.

As it turns out, users lie. They will often say whatever they think will please you, especially if they are your friends. They also have a hard time imagining how they will use products that don't exist, and a hard straightening out the reasons for their feelings. They will say "Yes, I totally want a site that will help me find cool things to do my city!" when what they really mean is "Yes, I wish I had more free time to go out with my friends!"

Ways to deal with this sad fact:

* Ask users "how much would you pay for this?" Follow up with "seriously, if I build it, you'll commit to paying that much?" Tends to bring them back to reality, but doesn't make sense for all products.

* Look for external evidence for user pain. If there is no tool on the market for doing X, but users manage to sorta-kinda cobble together four other products to sort of do X poorly, you can believe that they want X.

* Build quick little prototypes, as cheap as possible, and see what users actually do with them. (You've just done that -- good job :))

As it turns out, users lie

This can be overcome by explaining to them up front, that you are about to invest your soul in the effort and that they will be doing you a disservice if they are not honest and that failure later will be harder on you. When they realize that they are actually saving you a larger amount of future grief then they tend to be more honest.

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