I can't believe how many people are belittling this idea or strawmanning it as a couple of dollars or $5. What the page is getting at is if you can get a few customers to actually commit real money, then you've got an actionable idea on your hands. This is so much better than any wishy-washy "that's a good idea" or "I'd buy that". This is a full fledged, "Here's my money, I am buying this right now." sort of decision.
How to be 100% sure your startup idea is good
11–20 of 64 posts
Re: How to be 100% sure your startup idea is good
#12This works for some startups, but not all. More importantly, WHO those five are is very important. I could get five best friends to give me five dollars. That's meaningless in evaluating your idea.
Thats why they're offering to do it via WEB. If you go and ask your friends to go and pay via the site - that doesn't make much sense does it?
Re: How to be 100% sure your startup idea is good
#13Interesting idea. Although compare this to a survey (most commonly used idea research tool): even with a survey with hundreds of responses, there is the question of the sample's representativeness. Here the sample base is so small that the results (positive or negative) just cannot be regarded as statistically significant. It may be used as a complementary tool to measure the "virality", but cannot give me a 100% confidence level within 0% margin of error.
Re: How to be 100% sure your startup idea is good
#14So I guess Google, Facebook and Wikipedia wouldn't work?
Re: How to be 100% sure your startup idea is good
#15I think "100% sure" might be overselling it... Interesting how many meta-startups are emerging, though.
Selling pickaxes, my friend.
Re: How to be 100% sure your startup idea is good
#16So I guess Google, Facebook and Wikipedia wouldn't work?
I think 5 people would put down cash for any of these if explained correctly.
Re: How to be 100% sure your startup idea is good
#17Provocative idea. Agree (and upvoted swombat) that 100% is inaccurate. Here's the thing: how many applications do you use today that if they used the model upstartly.com is providing YOU would have invested in. I spend a huge amount of time in Clicky (web analytics) today and am a paying customer, but I wouldn't have given them $5 to build it. I needed to see it working—and try it—before I made that commitment.
Re: How to be 100% sure your startup idea is good
#18I put my startup on the service. One thing I have a problem with is that it exposes my personal email by default. I think you should make it private by default.
Re: How to be 100% sure your startup idea is good
#19This is like sampling. You think than a few people paying implies a lot of people are going to pay for your application. So this is a statistical problem about inference, perhaps some model of customer is required to get better estimates for the confidence interval of success.
Re: How to be 100% sure your startup idea is good
#20This works for some startups, but not all. More importantly, WHO those five are is very important. I could get five best friends to give me five dollars. That's meaningless in evaluating your idea.
Thats why they're offering to do it via WEB. If you go and ask your friends to go and pay via the site - that doesn't make much sense does it?
How many times have you built something cool/had a cool idea that you show your friends? Everytime.
I still think this is a good product, I'm just pointing out the importance of WHO/HOW to get meaningful people to pay.
This + adwords targeted at your target demo will be a smart way to test