How to test whether your idea has a market

http://blog.codeable.io/2013/01/24/how-to-test-whether-your-idea-has-a-market.html

by tzaman • 14 years ago

25 13 14 years ago

blog.codeable.io

duiker101• 14 years ago

I see a lot of articles from you guys lately. It's cool, the articles are not bad and you are doing it the right way, you market your product by giving good articles. I think this is fine, just don't send out too much before you run out of content and become boring. Nobody would benefice from that. Once a week should be enough. Just my 2c.

tzaman• 14 years ago

Thank you, we've been talking about it actually, and decided to start out with a bit more frequently then ease out a bit. Being new on the market some awareness and traction can do us good :)

impostervt2• 14 years ago

Would like to hear of an example where this worked. Even if I liked an idea someone pitched me on, I don't know if I'd give $10 to them to get early access to something they haven't started building yet.

Perhaps I'm jading at seeing too many bad Show HN posts where I think, who would want that?

ef42• 14 years ago

It certainly works when you're selling to a business and you're showing how you can take away some real pain, or make them some real additional revenue.

I have gone in with a demo and come away with a deal for real money. Then we built the real product around that customer's actual needs, which made it dramatically better than we could have by just guessing in advance how they would use it.

Edit: Also see just about everything on Kickstarter, where people often pay real money for things that don't exist yet.

totalrobe2• 14 years ago

These things do exist - Kickstarter products are required to have prototypes and concrete deliverables.

impostervt2• 14 years ago

Can you share some info on what you built?

varunkho• 14 years ago

And to find potential customers other than your mom&friends, [0] HN post can certainly help!

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4987836

totalrobe2• 14 years ago

Asking for money with no product? This is also called panhandling...

fro• 14 years ago

Ten dollars seems like a token amount that most clients would give you to just say, "Hey why not, maybe this will turn into something." I'd make it a higher amount or just, you know, genuinely ask them whether they would buy and use your product. Most people will give you their honest opinion either way.

ef42• 14 years ago

There's a misconception that actually plays in your favor here: most people dramatically underestimate the execution risk of building a new product, particularly software.

If you can communicate very clearly what the product is going to look like and what it's going to do, selling a product that isn't done yet is not much harder than selling one that is. In some ways it's easier, because the customers can fill in the details themselves, and they don't appreciate how hard it is to get all those detail right.

euros• 14 years ago

“Building a product to fit an existing market, is better than finding a market to fit an existing product.” - Unfortunately not my quote!

Toenex• 14 years ago

Isn't this preciously what Kickstarter [http://www.kickstarter.com/] is for?

JimWillTri• 14 years ago

If you can get someone to pay you $10 for an application you may or may not build in a year then you are either a hell of a salesman or you found someone truly gullible.

How to test whether your idea has a market

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