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Comment by ironmagma | Hacker News Reader

There’s a balance to be had. Show your thing too early and it can die. There’s a reason large companies don’t announce everything the moment it’s planned.

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There is a big difference between Apple tipping its hand and China printing out a bazillion clones of it before it even hits the market and testing to see if you actually have a market to start with. Apple does not have to test to see if it has a market to start with. People would buy white iTurds on a stick and show unboxing videos if Apple released. You can have a galaxy brain idea but since you don't have millions of fanatical existing customers, it is possible that you can not sell even one unit. So better to test the waters first.

It's not just about market fit though. Pixar didn't announce a movie as soon as it was conceived, and neither should you. Announcing too early often sets you up for failure.

False equivalency. OP is an indiehacker with (relatively speaking) $0 marketing budget versus a large company.

OP - keep validating and showing your early, "ugly" products. Marketing and market validation matter the most.

It’s an existence proof. Even at an indie startup, if you mention your idea too early there’s a risk you’ll lose the motivation to work on it due to negative reception. Not every idea that’s poo-poohed is bad.

The trick is knowing which feedback to listen to. If Dropbox listened to the negative feedback from HN on launch, they'd think there wasn't a market and it was a dumb idea. HN was (famously) wrong, partly because HN isn't the target market of the service.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

I’ve definitely had the experience of demo-ing something half baked and gotten stares, then completed the product and those same people who couldn’t connect the dots before understood the product and its value in its entirety. It’s highly dependent on the abstraction level of the product though. An SEO keyword search tool is relatively un-abstract in 2023, in 1999 this might have been a little harder for people to wrap their heads around. Maybe another way to say that is when you decide to make something novel, not only do you run the risk of building a bad product, but you run a very high risk of being early. I don’t think OP is running these risks with their current product though. It’s analogous enough to current products that it’s conceptually easy to pitch. Every founder has some slightly modified view on this philosophy. I’m personally a big proponent of talking to users and figuring out what they don’t understand about what you’re doing early on but not letting early external feedback dissuade you from completing a product when you see a need.

Yes, Thanks. Its all about handling my personal psychology. As an indiehacker, I need some encouragement early so I know I am not wasting my time

There's a difference between publicly launching something and having private discussions with key potential customers.

If you can't find pre-launch early adopters, you probably don't have a product.

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