You can save months of research by spending years of work and hundreds of thousands of people-hours building something that doesn't work.
And if you're a rich investor willing to bet on a lot of such things hoping to make it back on of the few that work, well, you just made that ratio even more lopsided.
One thing that has often surprised me about HN is how people routinely upvote and boast about how they faked a demo. Idk why we refuse to call that what it is: a lie. IDK if Jobs did it, it is still a lie. It's one thing to say that this is what we imagine a technology will be like, but to call it a demo and act like it is the actual tool and that its capabilities generalize to the tasks being shown is theater. Are tech bros just theater kids?
You're describing focus groups. They have a mixed history in product development.
Every product you interact with at the grocery store, every movie, most music, and most products in our modern life go through this process.
It's called user focused design.
If they buy, you're on the right track and are ready to scale up to a larger focus group.
This is called a startup though!
Get good feedback early & often
Focus groups are good for refining. They're absolutely terrible for new product development. If there is an OG playbook for start-ups defeating incumbents, it's in exploiting the committee-based designed process that large companies tend towards. (Owning a product decision is hard. Outsourcing it to a marketing consultant isn't.)
Where you and I probably agree is in the importance of finding the shortest path to a sale.
> It's called user focused design
You're quoting this guy [1]. He also did marketing consulting [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Norman#Nielsen_Norman_Grou...
It's not really that way anymore. The vision of a loan visionary coming up with a new product or invention like being hit by a lightning bolt and then getting rich by building a factory that builds it is just a fairy tale.
In reality it looks more like a series of focus groups. They may not be focus groups per se, but showing your idea to potential customers, getting feedback, refining and showing again is how it's done.
That's how startups that are successful do so.
Norman coined the term user focused design.
> may not be focus groups per se, but showing your idea to potential customers, getting feedback, refining and showing again is how it's done
Sure. I’d argue both focus groups and the lone visionary are myths. But in order to show an idea properly, you have to start thinking about building it. And to start thinking about building it properly, you have to start building it. For every Juicero there are teams iterating around a local optimum.