This discussion is awesome! I would never have believed such a simple conjecture could provide so much illumination around the myths and realities of startups. First, its a great deal, both for hmexx and folks who take him up on it. Frankly I think it could be revolutionary. My reasoning is as follows; Many "products" over the last couple of years have been fairly straight forward web "apps" built on top of existing…
I like it but I think the order should be reversed, before building the MVP, I would have built a landing page for each idea (after filtering the good ones), spend some money on marketing first and see if it gets beta sign ups traction (developer commits that if it does, they'll build it), only then pay for building it (I would also offer to sign an NDA with the developer protecting their idea if the deal doesn't exe…
One has to optimize for the 'harder' thing being done. So if the challenge is getting the MVP written, then this order makes sense, the risk on the $3000 is less than the risk on the $5000. If the challenge is getting people to understand it, then doing the landing page first makes sense. From hmexx's point of view $8,000 is at risk either way, except he "knows" he can do the customer acquisition part but doesn't know if someone can do the "MVP" part.
One of the realities this discussion has highlighted is how little young engineers (and some older ones too!) value the whole marketing/customer acquisition thing. But the beauty of it is that when the risk arbitrage is low enough, that doesn't matter. One has to ask is there a 'funding round' that is earlier than a 'seed/angel' round? Maybe an 'idea' round. Two people come together, one proves they can execute on building an MVP and one proves they can execute by acquiring customers, then the pair take the next step (assuming the thing works and customers are found). This really side steps the whole "I've got a great idea if I could just get it off the ground" discussion into "What are you willing to bet?"