

Fake it before you make it - andrewtbham
http://seriouslackofdirection.blogspot.com/2011/05/fake-it-before-you-make-it.html

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ChuckFrank
The problem with faking it, is that it becomes hard to distinguish between the
fakers and the makers. And if most everyone is a faker, then even makers can
be seen like a faker too. After spending enough time in Los Angeles and New
York, possible our national fake-it capitals, I can't tell you how frustrating
it is to spend time, money and effort trying to figure out who has real juice.
Especially when fakers are faking it so hard that they are standing tall next
to the real makers. So instead of encouraging people to fake-it. Just make it.
Something made is undeniable, something faked can be outed at any moment. If
what you want to make is too big to make, then make it smaller, and if that's
still too big, then make it smaller again. Instead of building on your fakes,
build on your makes. Having interviewed literally hundreds of candidates for
jobs, I have gladly hired a small time maker 100 times over a big time faker.

~~~
nostrademons
For most of the examples cited, it doesn't really matter whether someone is
faking it or making it. The whole idea is to connect up people with ideas of
what _can_ exist (entrepreneurs) together with people with ideas of what
_should_ exist (customers). There's no money changing hands; all you're giving
is an e-mail address. If the product ends up not existing in the end, you're
out the 5 seconds it took to type it in. If the product _does_ end up
existing, both you and the entrepreneur end up winning big.

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prodigal_erik
This contemptible approach turns your rightful marketing costs into negative
externalities for everyone else, filling a formerly efficient market with
nonexistent bullshit. I'd love to see the FTC nail anyone guilty of this,
though they probably can't afford to keep up. Maybe we need a blacklist.

EDIT: some of the examples involve actually providing the service you're
advertising, albeit in an unscalable way, and that's perfectly legitimate.
Just don't promise something you aren't at all ready to deliver.

~~~
derefr
What about Dropbox's method? There was no lead-gen site that tried to imply
for 99% of it that the product already existed; instead, there was just a
video containing synthetic "this is how we imagine this working" flows, and a
request for people to sign up if they were interested in seeing that vision
realized.

~~~
prodigal_erik
If "this isn't available" was clear up front, it sounds like a volunteer
market research panel, which is ethical iff requested openly (though I may not
have been inclined to sit through it unless I also needed ideas).

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code_duck
> Food on the Table did the tasks for their early customers by hand. Rather
> than creating web software, they implemented the service in person.

I tried this on a project, and then ended up with the by-hand parts as a
millstone around our necks. My partner and I couldn't agree on how to automate
the service, basically. I realized at some point it violated Derek Sivers'
advice, "Work on on your business instead of in your business.". So, if you're
going to do something laborious by hand that should be done by computer, make
sure you are going to be able to automate it later on. I'm never starting
another business where everything isn't self serve, automated and done at the
beginning.

~~~
ryanlchan
>I'm never starting another business where everything isn't self serve,
automated and done at the beginning.

Isn't this the exact point which the article argues against? Perhaps the
problem was really that you couldn't work out a good methodology to automate
these tasks with your partner, a problem that would've occurred even if you'd
tried to automate it at the beginning.

I think the real takeaway here is just the same "fail fast, fail early" we see
everywhere, but taken to the next level. Get Real urges you to ship your
product as early as possible, but this is saying that _you don't even need the
product_ to get started.

~~~
code_duck
The article cited the quoted as an example of 'fake it before you make it'.

My example is how I tried that, starting 'lean' - handling some procedures by
hand at first in lieu of writing a web interface and backend.

Part of the problem was my partner and I were learning to work together, but
mainly lack of time. This was compounded by a Catch-22 situation: I lacked
time to automate due to how much time it took to handle manually. The business
was growing very rapidly while we were trying to expand features for the
public as well as automate management procedures. It was my first successful
venture and having failed to do this right, I learned my lesson.

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jlees
I'm firmly behind the lean approach (though I don't think this article says
anything new). However, I do often wonder how customers really feel when they
hit a "Sign Up" link and are taken to an inexpertly crafted Wufoo form
designed to harvest their address.

Dropbox got it right, but I've seen several examples where I think "I hope
this scales, 'cos those first 50 visitors know they've been tricked and ain't
coming back".

~~~
nostrademons
RescueTime did that, and I thought "Hey, this is pretty cool, I'll put in my
email address and they can get back to me when they have it working."

~~~
jlees
Yeah -- I think this shines when you're solving a problem that's so important,
and unaddressed, that people are all over it when all you have is an email
form.

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vaksel
fake it till you make it in a B2B setting doesn't really work. People tend to
want to see a working product before they sign up at $10K a month

~~~
nostrademons
Lots of B2B companies will sign up a customer first and then use the revenues
from that to build the product. It's no different from contract development -
you spec out what you'll be delivering, agree on a price, and then build it.
The only difference is that you retain rights to the product, so that you can
sell it to some other customer as well.

~~~
KiwiNige
I've worked at a company whose motto was "Smoke and Mirrors". They'd try to
sell based om the wireframe, but tell the customer it was a fully functional
product that just need to be customised for their environment.

I never really saw it work that well for them. Sure they could get a lot of
interest but any sales they closed were a nightmare to deliver because you had
to develop a system in a timeframe that only allowed some tweaking.

EDIT: what I mean is that it's fine to use the model you mention, but IMO you
have to be upfront with the customer about it.

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tchvil
We did that for several years with web apps over SAP.

We developed a series of reusable building blocks, grabbed from one
implementation to the other. But what was presented to clients were nice and
trendy png screens, based on the last information we got from them.

Leaving our competitors in the dust, with their product releases,
documentation and aging interfaces.

But it's over now, today I'm in a SaaS startup, and here we can't fake
anymore. When people try your app, they see the real thing.

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p4bl0
The Earbits guys do this for a video tour of their website. The first time you
visit it there's a banner link to watch that video, but if you click it it
says something along the lines of "thank you for your interests, we wanted to
know if people actually want to see that video before hiring Spielberg to make
it for real". This is brilliant and the fun part of the message even makes
users happy with not seeing the video.

~~~
ChuckFrank
this is not really faking it. It's just being smart. & funny.

~~~
nostrademons
But that's exactly what the companies cited in the article did.

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mikecane
Pitch meetings for TV/movie scripts often have writers making up stories on
the spot. Then if they get the green light, what they're really thinking is,
"Holy shit! Now I have to find a way to _write_ that!"

~~~
jonnathanson
Only difference is that pitch meetings for TV shows usually have a known
commodity attached to the pitch -- someone whose very presence is meant to
reduce at least one of the five hundred thousand risk variables associated
with a TV pitch. If that known commodity is an established writer -- let's say
Larry David, or Aaron Sorkin, or whoever -- then the execs can reasonably
assume that he'll be able to write whatever he's just sold.

Rarely, if ever, does someone without a track record even get a network pitch
meeting. And even then, he'll get it only if some big name or piece of IP is
associated with him. The strength of the concept matters relatively little
compared to what name or "brand" is attached.

All this is for good reason, obviously. It would make little economic sense
for networks to drop millions of dollars on ideas alone. For that kind of
money, they could hire legions of fresh college grads to sit in a room all
day, eat ramen, and generate concepts for someone else to write. As it is in
the tech world, execution is everything in the creative business. There are a
striking number of parellels in both industries, actually. (Full disclosure:
have worked in both industries).

~~~
mikecane
There are also pitch meetings to production companies, where writers are hired
to do TV episodes. Unknowns sometimes get their breaks there. Harlan Ellison
did. Tracy Torme did. Still happens today. I went too wide, mentioning movies,
I guess.

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kapilt
Another upshot to this method is that (a) a business/product guy can do it
without an engineer. (b) and if its an engineer faking it, it will give
her/him some insight into what it takes to build it.

