Ask HN: Can I charge early adopters for a bare-bone MVP of my product?

If early adopters won't pay for it, nobody will. Your early adopters are often the ones hacking a solution at a higher price and are happy to shell out money for something that works better than theirs.

There are some free business models (e.g. Google, Facebook) but this is a hard route that requires tons of capital, and probably involves selling the free users as the product.

That has been the thought process so far. Thanks.

The reason I was struggling with this question was the fact that there would be no self-serve model to begin with. I would be onboarding every single customer 1:1, and then once it has been set up they can take it up from there.

Onboarding customers 1:1 is something a lot of SaaS still do. That's fine, just build it into your business model. Hire account managers, etc.

It's also fine to do things that don't scale, that's how most startups launch. It might not keep up with the pace of growth, just have a backup plan for that.

Also just saw the last question. No, probably don't charge them yearly for a product that hasn't been around for a month. We see a lot of products where the site keeps breaking down after a few months. You need a lot of trust that you're willing to commit. Many get it with a 100% money back guarantee or even 110% money back.

So, either month-on-month or a one time fee with money back guarantee. Makes sense

Sounds like you may be asking the wrong questions. As you may be assuming the product direction is correct and uniform for your customer base - but is it? The pricing sounds ok, I just doubt you'll get useful information if you have small scale and no current users. You may confirm some people will pay, but they may be wanting to pay for different functionality to what you build. Some evidence of willingness to pay without churn data is pretty useless for improving your chance at success unfortunately. Now it does decrease your chance of building something nobody -ever- wants, but... that's not the same thing, and you should care about the former really.

In a third of the time you'd spend setting up payments and describing the idea with marketing, you should perhaps ask people about their problems, then mention your solution contextually, and then listen carefully to what they say.

Do all the responses talk about it doing what it does now? Then charge.

Do they talk about mostly one clear functionality/vision they all want? Great, charge and build.

Do the responses cover multiple ideas/functionalities? That's bad, it means you have to find a niche with a plurality of expectations, or this will never work because the expectations are too varied for a cohesive profitable offering, or tend towards integrated visions that you cannot compete with on the build power of a small team. Sometimes people don't ask for what they turn out to want (e.g. iPhone, Notion itself with great design and low stress), but this is the case for very few successful startups, and if you look carefully, they all tend to rapidly respond to feedback post-launch anyhow.

I heard this general idea from Jason Cohen - invalidating - and it's incredibly useful. This sounds like the right scenario to apply it.

That's the very assumption I want to stay away from. Hence not launching a full-blown product, but a barebone version of it. I want to see which type of customers are most drawn to it, and which ones off them use it the most.

Yes, no current users and no churn data is a bummer, but since I am just starting this, that's pretty much the hand that's dealt to me.

Thanks for taking the time in writing a detailed note. Took notes. :)

You dont “can”. You must.

The only real validation of a product - either people pay for it or not.

Almost every single response has been this - both here as well as elsewhere I posed this question. Thanks. :)

What problem are you solving and for whom?

If it's a real problem for real people (and not an imagined one for imagined B2Bs), what are they doing right now? Is it good enough?

Why do you, of all people, want to solve this problem, of all problems? What's the fire emanating from inside?

With good answers to these questions you'll find it a whole lot easier talking with clients. If the problem is real and painful enough for them to have cobbled together a solution, they won't care if you made your software out of matchsticks.

Support pages exist. Some businesses use documentation, faqs. Some use systems like intercom. Some simply leave an email up there for customers to reach out at.

It works. But is it good enough? Probably not. And even though there are competitors out there, I also think the market is large enough for a good enough opportunity for a new product to exist.

But yeah, the problem seems to be real and painful enough.

If you are solving a truly painful problem, people will pay matter no matter how buggy and unfinished the product is.

Charge 10% of the value received. Estimate the value based on extra revenue generated, expenses saved, time saved, etc. (Business owners should value their time worth more than $50/hr. So multiply hours by $50-100)

The time saved would be in answering support requests, or saving time at end of customers. Competing/similar products charge between $20-$100/mo, so I figured charging $100/yr is definitely not steep. And a customer who is paying $100 for an upcoming product can definitely be considered a customer likely to fall within the 'validation' parameters.

If you could squeeze in LLM integration for that price, somehow undercutting GPT+, but with RAG on your own data, it would be a steal.

AI chatbot custom trained on the customers' data would be the next logical step in this. But at this stage I am more inclined to testing the water. Shipping out something quick and then build it up from there as and when I successfully onboard paying customers. Do not want to spend weeks building a product and then be the only one using it. Thought I would gauze the interest first.

what is your Ideal Customer Profile? How much money do they have?

Since it is a knoweldgebase, the customers are businesses. Given any business would be spending at least $20/mo on hosting alone, I thought $100/yr would be a good price point to start with.

As far as ideal customer profile goes, I have not yet zeroed down on that. I thought I would let customer response/affinity to guide me towards discovering that.

Your assumptions seem off-base:

- Not all businesses spend 20 a month on hosting. They either are big enough to have IT systems where 20 a month doesn't cover their needs, or small enough that a Facebook page does.

- Even if that number were correct, your product can't say it replaces that cost unless it replaces all functions they get from that hosting. A knowledgebase based on Notion seems like a fine idea, but does not sound like it will cover every reason a business would have to host content.

From your logic, you ideal customer is someone large enough to need an online knowledgebase, yet small enough that they cannot tack it onto an existing system and need to spend 20 a month to host it. Your question is: Does such a company exist?