> Use networking to determine how valuable the product is and if people give a damn about it. If no one wants to talk to you about it, no one is going to want to pay for it.
This is a key thing. A lot of developers operate in the belief that “if you build it they will come”.
A small amount of market validation would prevent a lot of wasted time.
- Do people have the problem you are solving?
- Are they willing to pay a sufficient amount to solve it?
- Are there enough of them to make it worthwhile?
The real danger is that we often don’t want to hear the answers to these questions. So we either don’t ask or we dismiss the answers that we get. Wishful thinking is a dangerous thing.
If you only have a vague idea of what the product will be (or at least what the real problem to solve is) and you don't have any potential buyers to talk to then you really shouldn't be writing a single line of code at all. You should be building your network and experience so that you do understand those things, then you go and build an MVP. So many developers fall into this trap.
I always recommend the book The Mom Test to would-be entrepreneurs. It goes into more detail on why asking people if they will buy something is worthless (as you mentioned), and how you can ask much better questions to find and validate problems worth solving.
+1 on recommending the Mom Test, it's one of the most important books I've read.
I'd say in addition to entrepreneurs, it's an important book for product teams / product engineers to understand what the Mom Test teaches, and tune the filter on asking the right questions to get the highest signal, and ensure the solution closely matches the value prop for the customer. Then sales and marketing get a whole lot easier when you've asked the right questions and solved the right problems.
I think that is part of the problem. Starting out with only a vague idea of what the product will be sounds very unwise.
Successful businesses I have worked at have started out solving a real problem for someone (in a business) - with that person telling us that they know other businesses have the same problem.
If someone in an industry comes to you with a problem - and they have worked in the industry sufficiently long enough to have been in multiple companies - they can give you a pretty good idea of what size the prize might be.
The difficulty a lot of us have working in software is that we don’t really get enough exposure to these people.
This is whats perfect about web3 that most pundits miss
It takes the looooong web 2.0 funnels and flips it to a single step:
Your customers pay to interact with your app at all and there is insatiable demand at the beginning, unless you do some boomer-level system design that is based on pretending that a 3 trillion dollar crypto native audience doesnt exist already and you need to onboard a bunch of technophobes.
In comparison, the entire web 2.0 ethos basically sums up to getting a customer to put their credit card into your website for a small charge, as a funnel for a bigger recurring charge later
in web3 all of your users are at the last step at the very beginning. they are even paying for all your hosting costs. they are paying to update your database! and your actual business model of being some form of plumbing with a transaction fee, if you didnt just sell a token collection, is fine and has low overhead costs
this will continue attracting developers and their entire audience in perpetuity because the entire web 2.0 ecosystem cannot compete with that
I think it means "if the whole point of your application is that customers pay to do anything, then you short circuit all the typical process of acquiring and monetizing customers". Of course you can still have zero customers nevertheless.
that web3 apps are just optimized web2.0 apps especially with regards to how marketing funnels work to get paid users, further goes on to explain why and how
that doesn’t matter here and it wasn’t really disparaging
the only people that have an issue with web3 have a characteristic and typically describe an irrelevant system design that doesn’t factor in the simple reality that users are paying in web3 and wouldn’t in web2.0, the only people having an issue creating web3 apps have a characteristic, for example I just got off a call with someone trying to jump on the web3 bandwagon for hotel reservations - a technophobic audience that should be ignored for web3 ux fictions - and the only people funding broken web2 apps that are supposed to use web3 rails have a characteristic
reclaim the term like every marginalized group does
It's curious, because some of your other posts[0] would suggest someone who is a little more price sensitive than someone who has made more than 10 million dollars from their own website. But I'm probably reading this incorrectly or something.
also out of curiosity, in your world why does me saying a third party charge other people money, over two years ago or at any point in time, suggest what you said it would suggest. it would be a matter if other people are price sensitive, for reference
if one were looking for something to invalidate or grasping for an ad hominem, doesnt it require interpreting the posting accurately as well at a bare minimum?
In my experience, people who are less price sensitive tend to not think about inconsequential sums. So it was surprising to me to read that someone who has made over $10,000,000 would care about whether or not Calendly would charge for no-shows.
Just curious about the thought process. That's all.
> Just curious about the thought process. That's all.
the answer is that calendly does not charge for no-shows and my time is valuable, which would match the worldview you’re looking for, and on the defensive perception, I’m not sure if you really understand the interaction proposed.
but if we were on the same page all along, then we also have a different definition of defensive since clarifying whether you are perceiving the same concept is not defensive to wonder about.
Like, isn’t there another comment somewhere else in my post history that would be better to question what you think an 8-figure HN user would be doing with their time? since you don’t know the value of the intended conversations on the calendly schedule, that requesting they charge wouldn’t be factor in supporting your validity or not of price sensitivity or inconsequential sums, and the other party would be charged either way, not me. I would define this whole line of reasoning to be a non-sequitur.
in any case, if you would like to talk more about web3 user acquisition funnels and how it compresses web2.0 ones, removing a magic based marketing industry and replacing them with paying customers, I'm available for that.
hey man, relax. i keep reading a comment from someone making an innocuous statement that isn't intended to imply anything about you, then reading a loooooong post from you explaining how you're DEFINITELY TOTALLY NOT AT ALL the thing you're imagining they're implying. take it from me, I'm really highstrung and defensive, you gotta make some time to breath over the next couple weeks.
if you reduce frictions that existing web3 users actually have then yeah its way easier, have to pay some influencers though and infiltrate a couple discords and get people's attention onchain as well
exactly. thats my entire point. there is $3tr+ sloshing around in the crypto economy from crypto natives. just scrap any idea that isnt catering directly to crypto natives.
philisters on HN are not our clientele. they’ll never get it and it doesnt matter anymore. but if you are a developer or “BUIDL” er there are unique system designs that are superior than anything web2.0 infrastructure has to offer.
One thing I've always stumbled on is finding the people to even ask the questions to. How do you contact people in the domain you're interested in and how do you convince them to give you the time of day?
This is a key thing. A lot of developers operate in the belief that “if you build it they will come”.
A small amount of market validation would prevent a lot of wasted time.
- Do people have the problem you are solving?
- Are they willing to pay a sufficient amount to solve it?
- Are there enough of them to make it worthwhile?
The real danger is that we often don’t want to hear the answers to these questions. So we either don’t ask or we dismiss the answers that we get. Wishful thinking is a dangerous thing.