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Painful Lesson: Always 'Show and Tell' Your Product Before You Develop It

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Painful Lesson: Always 'Show and Tell' Your Product Before You Develop It

#11

Post by AlbertCory »

Asking people for their opinion on anything (in my case, it's writing) is an art. Not everyone's opinion is worth listening to. If you throw it out to the general public, you'll get a lot of stupid ones. It's better to pick a few people you respect, who are not uncritical lovers of your work.

But you need to do that. As the creator, you have a blindness that it's impossible to get past all by yourself.

Re: Painful Lesson: Always 'Show and Tell' Your Product Before You Develop It

#12

Post by SkyPuncher »

ironmagma wrote: post #5

There’s a balance to be had. Show your thing too early and it can die. There’s a reason large companies don’t announce everything the moment it’s planned.

There's a difference between publicly launching something and having private discussions with key potential customers.

If you can't find pre-launch early adopters, you probably don't have a product.

Re: Painful Lesson: Always 'Show and Tell' Your Product Before You Develop It

#13

Post by jsunderland »

vitruvian_man wrote: post #8
ironmagma wrote: post #5

There’s a balance to be had. Show your thing too early and it can die. There’s a reason large companies don’t announce everything the moment it’s planned.

False equivalency. OP is an indiehacker with (relatively speaking) $0 marketing budget versus a large company. OP - keep validating and showing your early, "ugly" products. Marketing and market validation matter the most.

I’ve definitely had the experience of demo-ing something half baked and gotten stares, then completed the product and those same people who couldn’t connect the dots before understood the product and its value in its entirety. It’s highly dependent on the abstraction level of the product though. An SEO keyword search tool is relatively un-abstract in 2023, in 1999 this might have been a little harder for people to wrap their heads around. Maybe another way to say that is when you decide to make something novel, not only do you run the risk of building a bad product, but you run a very high risk of being early. I don’t think OP is running these risks with their current product though. It’s analogous enough to current products that it’s conceptually easy to pitch. Every founder has some slightly modified view on this philosophy. I’m personally a big proponent of talking to users and figuring out what they don’t understand about what you’re doing early on but not letting early external feedback dissuade you from completing a product when you see a need.

Re: Painful Lesson: Always 'Show and Tell' Your Product Before You Develop It

#14

Post by whartung »

By a similar note, I'm working on a pet project, with no commercial aspirations, but, yea, it would be nice if others eventually use it.

And by that notion, I have lots of ideas, but I must continually consciously reign myself in and try to not fall into a hole for a "nice to have". I don't even have a "have" yet, and would be good to get that finished before we get to the "nice" to haves.

But, I whittle away, pushing another quarter inch forward on my 10 mile journey. I still find myself stuck in a featuritis pothole now and again.

Having a destination document can help keep you on track.

Re: Painful Lesson: Always 'Show and Tell' Your Product Before You Develop It

#15

Post by tstrimple »

There was a series of "hackathons" I enjoyed called Startup Weekend. They put much more focus on the business validation by talking to people than they did on the actual hacking portion, but the presentations always had a tech demo component as well. But the overall judging weighed the market validation quite highly. It was an interesting change from the hackathons where you just build a cool tech demo.

https://www.techstars.com/communities/startup-weekend

Re: Painful Lesson: Always 'Show and Tell' Your Product Before You Develop It

#16

Post by mhuffman »

ironmagma wrote: post #5

There’s a balance to be had. Show your thing too early and it can die. There’s a reason large companies don’t announce everything the moment it’s planned.

There is a big difference between Apple tipping its hand and China printing out a bazillion clones of it before it even hits the market and testing to see if you actually have a market to start with. Apple does not have to test to see if it has a market to start with. People would buy white iTurds on a stick and show unboxing videos if Apple released. You can have a galaxy brain idea but since you don't have millions of fanatical existing customers, it is possible that you can not sell even one unit. So better to test the waters first.

Re: Painful Lesson: Always 'Show and Tell' Your Product Before You Develop It

#17

Post by Dudester230602 »

Best growth hacking thing to do now is to make an HN post about lesson learned and to make sure all the links are included. Like the OP.

Later on it should be possible to make another HN post about the impact of the previous HN post on the sign up counts. Make sure to include the links there too.

Re: Painful Lesson: Always 'Show and Tell' Your Product Before You Develop It

#20

Post by mhuffman »

AlbertCory wrote: post #11

Asking people for their opinion on anything (in my case, it's writing) is an art. Not everyone's opinion is worth listening to. If you throw it out to the general public, you'll get a lot of stupid ones. It's better to pick a few people you respect, who are not uncritical lovers of your work. But you need to do that. As the creator, you have a blindness that it's impossible to get past all by yourself.

There is a book called "The Mom Test" that has this perspective.
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