
Ask HN: How to validate people's willingness to buy without breaking promises? - augb
I recently read an article [1] that was about how to validate a business idea on the cheap (both time and money). The article was well-written, and the business this individual started seems to be going well.<p>In a nutshell, the author was seeking to answer two questions. The first was trying to assess whether there was a potential market for the author&#x27;s idea. The second question was seeking an answer was: &quot;Will people pay enough to make this a meaningful business?&quot; It is <i>how</i> the author goes about answering the second question that concerns me here.<p>The author put up a basic web page with a simple web site with a button to order the product in question. The button actually sent the potential customer into a purchase work-flow which ends up charging their credit card. The author follows-up with an email indicating that the product is not available and offers a full refund. Some &quot;customers&quot; request this, but the majority do not. Eventually, the author ends up refunding all of the &quot;customers&quot; since the author is not able to deliver on the promise of fulfilling the order in the time frame specified in the follow-up email. I do not think the author was intentionally misleading the &quot;customers&quot; on this point. I think the author did not realize how much work would be involved in actually fulfilling that promise. It comes out later in the article that an unspecified amount of money is spent over a time frame approaching a year before they were able to deliver on the initial promise. (I do not know whether the business was able to deliver on the promise to the original &quot;customers&quot;.)<p>Is there a way to do an experiment on the cheap, that does reliably validate the business without misleading potential customers in the process?<p>[1] I debated about whether I should link to the article. I have decided <i>not</i> to. Really, this article could have been written (and has been written) by any number of folks about any number of businesses.
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ilghiro
I'm not particularly fan of this or similar practices because A) it's a bit
morally grey to say the least, and B) you're not actually testing a business
idea, you're simply testing how a product sounds.

A half decent example is Evernote (recent financial troubles aside). Imagine
trying to cook up a super quick landing page for Evernote and then buying some
adwords. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't get very far because who wants
"Notetaking App #784" (which is about all the information you can give in such
circumstances)?

Based on that you'd assume no one wants to pay for/download a note-taking app.
Of course this is provably false as many people pay for myriad note-taking
apps. Where's the discrepancy?

When you land on a products landing page there's far more than just product
screenshots. There's also the impression created by the brand, one you've
probably heard of before you got there. There's customer reviews, there's well
thought out pricing designed to make you pay exactly what you can afford,
there's a thousand techniques used to make sure they get the sale.

Effectively, I'd say it's very difficult to distill all this down into a quick
experiment that proves anything.

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augb
What troubles me is that this is seen in many start-up/business circles as not
only okay, but even a preferred method of idea validation. The original
"customers" acted in good faith. The "business" was not forthcoming with the
non-existence of the product (and my guess is the non-existence of the
company). Since refunds were given, all is okay, many would say. I do not
agree with this viewpoint.

In asking my question and relating the background, I am not seeking for folks
to change my opinion of the ethics or to disparage anyone who disagrees with
me. I _am_ seeking to understand whether there is a way to experiment in a way
that does not make promises that may or may not be kept. (Promises are broken,
for example, when only a handful of people "purchase" the product, and the
"business owner", therefore, chooses not to pursue the business, even if
refunds are provided.)

