How I Made $4000 Selling A Product I Didn't Have

Interesting - he gave a talk on this at Microconf Europe which was this last weekend, and a very good conference with lots of cool and interesting people. There was (I thought) something of a feeling in the room of "hrm, maybe this is a bit over the line?" although everyone was appreciative of the fact that it was a much stronger validation of the idea than just handing over an email address. Watching Adii talk, I certainly got the impression he was not 100% happy with the approach himself, and wrestled with it some.

OTOH, I can understand the risk avversion: if they've given you a CC number (they were not, however, charged), they're a Real Customer and your product is far more likely to have legs than just getting an email address, which is in turn better than not even having a pre-launch page and just hoping people want whatever it is you've slaved away building for months. Spending a lot of money to build something only to find no one wants it, or wants a fairly different version sucks big time!

A good read. However, the first rule of using white lies is you don't talk about it (in public - this would be a great thing to use PublicBeta for! ;-)) otherwise you get the sanctimonious types in the peanut gallery excited, as some of the comments here demonstrate.

This isn't excusing bad behaviour at all. In fact, I've been very up-front about the fact that this technique relies on deception and that I didn't like that bit.

I stick to what I've said though, which is that putting up a landing page with an e-mail signup and a "Request Early Access"-kinda thing is similarly deceptive. The only difference is that I actually asked for CC details. To that extent, I'm willing to do whatever I need to do to see my startup succeed.

This is obviously not for everyone and that's why I posted the quote from Lincoln.

I am currently doing a startup too. It seems that I can handle all the design, coding and technical side of things but I cannot market and do sales.

Although I agree with some of the points such as launching early and the communication aspect of it. I'm against deceptive tactics to get sales. Even though he said that it didn't feel good, then why continue with the same tactic? Does getting the sales and numbers justify the actions?

I'm in the same boat as the author at the moment and if anyone out there has any advice I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks in advance.

If you use deception to found a company, you'll find reasons to continue using it while running the company, and you'll eventually lose the company because of it.

There are ways to measure buying signals. Please research them. Here, I'll do you a solid, and Google "how to measure buying signals"

Oh, look: http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/ca...

While it's not my intention to hold this up as the authority on buying signals, what you will pick up on is that nothing on this page talks about the number of subscribers on an email list. Subscriber counts are, at best a weak buying signal. It measures interest, not willingness to purchase.