Comment by api
6 years ago
How do you get quality feedback? In my experience people will often say yes when asked or shown a mock up but will not buy. You don't find out who will actually buy until they try a functional product.
I really suspect that the lean startup method belongs in the early web era when there was a ton of low hanging fruit with simple market research and simple MVPs. All that low hanging fruit has been picked. Today it's pick your brutally hard problem and iterate for 1-2 years before you get a MVP that you can test.
> How do you get quality feedback? In my experience people will often say yes when asked or shown a mock up but will not buy. You don't find out who will actually buy until they try a functional product.
Ask them to pay you based on the mocks. If they say no, ask why. If they say yes, take their money and give it back in N days if you haven't built your MVP. I've done this BTW - it works.
> You don't find out who will actually buy until they try a functional product.
You'd be surprised how many people have gross business problems that some well-placed code would solve and they'd be thrilled to pay you for it because the other options suck.
I have real trouble wrapping my head around this kind of thing because I can't imagine paying for a product under those circumstances, no matter how useful it'd be. I get that it must work since so many people say it does, but it's totally alien to me.
If you don't have something to sell me, now, why are you asking for money? Am I an investor? No? Come back when you have a product. I'll probably still say no because I won't expect your business to last very long, but you'll be 100x closer to a "yes" than you are now, which is about as far from it as you could possibly be. Is this an unusual attitude?
This is the hard truth that people leave out.
Just build the product - the purest most minimal version you can. I mean be judicious with the knife, and slice like it's going out of style. Accept it - you're throwing out 100% of the code eventually - be fine with it; it's not ideal, but you'll ship and be live. Add the analytics you need - test hypotheses. Reach out to people who drop in and drop off, they're more valuable than features.
Don't agonize over "this isn't done", "this isn't perfect" or "it needs X to be useful". Get it out, charge for users, and you'll build a sustainable business, or it will fail quickly. Sure, this may not be VC sexy - but you know what, you can build product quickly, validate or toss and idea and move along or improve, based on feedback.
This ships. It ships repeatedly. It's not perfect, it's not awesome, but it works, always.