
How to test if your startup idea will succeed - mgrouchy
http://untemplater.com/business/entrepreneurship/how-to-test-if-your-startup-idea-will-succeed/
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Vindexus
In keeping with this quote: "Ask your target demographic if your idea would
solve their pain" I'd like to ask everyone here if they'd be interested in an
app I want to work on.

Basically it would be a web app that would let you plug in FAQ/Help dialogs
into your web app.

The code would be something like

    
    
      <div id="helpButton">
      <a href="#section/lists" class="helpdialog">Help</a>
      </div>
      <div id="webAppStuff">
      Your Todo List App Here
      </div>
      <script src="http://myhelpapp.com?api_key=647y89y423hg8qg3"></script>
    

Screenshot of the design I want to use: <http://twitpic.com/1209jh>

That's the OSX version of the jQuery Simple Modal plugin.

You just add "helpdialog" as a class to any link or button or whatever and it
would read the href attribute of that item to get the correct help section to
display.

~~~
keefe
I like the idea and the UI pattern quite a bit - are you thinking of this as
an open source project or as something people will pay for? I think it's a
great open source product but I would be surprised to see someone pay for it.

~~~
Vindexus
I think if the product was good enough people would definitely pay for it. I
would just need some stats and facts to back up my claim that it's worth it.
That would be the hard part.

But if I can state "Use this service to reduce support emails by 30%" and have
the data to back that up, then that's something people might pay for. If you
spend 1 hour a day answering support emails, and you can cut that down to 40
minutes, then you're saving more than 6 hours of work a month. That's worth
some money.

The tough part is making it good enough to be a time saver.

~~~
keefe
The reason I made that comment is that from what I see so far, it is rather
trivial to implement. There's not a lot of detail in what I saw so far so
maybe I am missing something. However, if all you have is a popup or tooltip
to a FAQ - the cost to implement that is much, much less than the cost of
writing effective documentation for each feature. I think the tough part is
putting together some set of features that justifies not only the cost - but
also the risk of adding an external dependency. I hate external dependencies,
particularly those from unknown players that are not open source.

