
How to (In)validate Your Startup Idea - sophmonroe
http://blog.wepay.com/blog/2010/12/17/how-to-invalidate-your-startup-idea/
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edw519
_If anybody responds, tell them that the offer is oversubscribed and that it
is no longer available._

Wow!

A company built to handle other people's money that recommends deception.
What's wrong with this picture?

~~~
aberman
I think you are being a little melodramatic. This is to vet an idea, not a
sustainable way to build a business. I even said that it could/should be more
of a thought experiment. And besides, I'm not recommending that you
maliciously and deleteriously deceive people.

pg on naughtiness: "Though the most successful founders are usually good
people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not goody-
two-shoes good. Morally they care about getting the big questions right but
not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word "naughty" rather
than evil. They delight in breaking rules--but not rules that matter. This
quality may be redundant, though; it may be implied by imagination."

~~~
edw519
Sorry to say, Rich, that was not the response I expected.

AFAIC, there is no gray area here. I have argued (yes, many have disagreed
with me) the same for years here.

A little background...

I have seen more deals than you can imagine ruined because someone lost trust.
As simple as that. The salesman fibbing to his wife on the phone in front of
the customer. The contractor paying the 3rd party vendor a little extra to get
his customer's deal. I even saw someone lose a million dollar deal because he
took his customer for a ride in his leased car with the speedometer
disconnected.

And the reasoning was always the same: "If he could do this little thing to
someone else, what will he do with my big deal?"

It's not a matter of what is effective. It's a matter of what's right and
wrong. For many people (me included, of course), there is no gray area.

I realize that jaywalking != murder, but deception in business tactics is
always a big deal. When one has little more than your reputation to judge, all
data that affects that reputation is fair game.

I was disappointed with the original post. Calling deception "a little
melodramatic" and citing a pg naughtiness quote as an excuse leaves me more
disappointed than ever.

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aberman
If I had more time, I'd go through all your previous HN comments disparaging
WePay for different reasons. Somehow I doubt your motivation for doing so is a
sterling commitment to morality. If it was, I doubt you would introduce your
criticism with: "A company built to handle other people's money...", and
instead, just focus your criticism on the point you are attacking.

~~~
tptacek
No, that's really what Ed's like. He's also _really_ not OK with you smoking
up to relax ("You have trouble reading and writing and 'rithmetic, so you need
a little chemical help. You pussy."); I'm pretty sure he also once posted he'd
never work with you if you pirated software. I've been surprised by many
things he's said. I think he's coming from a principled place.

That doesn't mean I agree with him totally... but I don't think he's gunning
for you.

If Ed's disappointed with you, someone else in the real world who could be
vital to your business is going to be similarly disappointed. Why not figure
out how to fix it? You're going to be successful either way, we all know it,
but for the most part nobody in the real world is going to give enough of a
shit about you to get past the first negative reaction they have to you. Might
as well use Ed as a scientific curiosity.

~~~
edw519
Thanks for the memories, Thomas (I think).

I remember that drug post from a few years ago. If was about an English PhD
who posted that he needed drugs to cope and I really ripped into him. I wasn't
upset so much that he "smoked to relax" but that it ended up here, where it
could have easily been misunderstood by someone impressionable (and young). I
got shredded by my fellow hn'ers that day. Amazing that you remembered it.

You're right, I won't work with anyone whose ethics I suspect. Pretty simple,
I think.

For the record, I'm certainly not a saint. Once you get to know me irl
(hopefully that will come about some day), you'll see. It's just that I have
never found any substitute for pristine business ethics, and I occasionally
point that out here. The feedback, both kinds, is usually quick and
predictable.

I'm not disappointed, just concerned, that's all.

~~~
barrkel
I think you're deeply naive about how human ethics work. You really cannot
easily judge someone else until you have walked a mile in their shoes. I see
it a lot: people thinking that character is more important than circumstance,
when the reverse is true the _vast_ majority of the time. Character really
counts for very little, and in any case you cannot reliably infer much from
the ethics of decisions in one circumstance to predict behaviour in another
circumstance, unless the circumstances are similar in ways that match the
causal reasoning of the agent making the ethical choices - and that reasoning
is a hidden model, requiring you to read minds to figure it out, or saving
that, hanging around that person for months and years.

For example, things like jaywalking - did you know that jaywalking is
statistically safer than crossing the road at a pedestrian crossing in the US,
on a per-crossing basis? If you knew that, would it change your opinion of the
"ethics" of someone who broke that law? Some people put staying alive at a
higher premium than obeying the law. But someone who didn't know that may just
think they're a jackass.

It's also easily gamed. When people have such a simplistic and naive view of
ethics / morality / character, their adversaries can put on little morality
plays to fool them into a false sense of trust.

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jonpaul
You're equating ethics with the law. They are not the same. In some
circumstances, it may be seen as ethical to break the law. One that comes off
the top of my head would be... what if you're wife is going into labor and you
need to speed to get to the hospital? Obviously the scenario presented has its
own set of circumstances, but at face value it could be seen as ethical to do
so. Or, how about to speed-up and pass someone?

~~~
barrkel
No, I'm not. I'm criticizing a particular mindset which has rules in mind
(which may or may not be the law) and judges people by how closely they follow
those rules, on the basis that people who break rules in one area may break
rules in other areas, simply because rules are rules.

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emiller829
I'm not sure I'd want to take any advice that suggests starting off a business
relationship by lying to the potential customer.

(Re: "Identify your target customer. COLD email 20 of them and offer to pay
THEM to use your product if they are willing to offer some feedback. See how
many respond. If anybody responds, tell them that the offer is oversubscribed
and that it is no longer available. See how many of those people still ask
about the product.")

~~~
steveklabnik
Dry testing has always been controversial, it seems.

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daemon
I'd imagine that merely asking the potential users if they'd buy now, if it
were available, would serve the same purpose.

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swombat
No, it wouldn't. "Would you buy know?" doesn't select the same people as
"Click here to buy now".

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alain94040
I fully agree with the article, however, when I think of most the big
successes of the last 10 years, they all fall in the exception category.

What does that tell me? Would that have worked for twitter? No. For Google
search? Barely. For Facebook? Probably not. GroupOn? Probably.

~~~
krschultz
You probably could have done this with Google search.

Would you love to replace the super slow inaccurate search you are using now
with one that delivered accurate results in 1/10th of the time?

~~~
brlewis
[1999] Sure, but I'll believe it when I see it. Look, I've already tried about
10 different search engines, and even with the best of them (altavista) you
count on having to click through a few results pages to find what you want.
Web servers aren't psychic, you know. You get out what you put into it. There
are already a lot of smart, well-funded companies working on this, so good
luck.

People who Knew Search back then knew that tedium was part of the bargain,
just like people who Know photo sharing today know that tedious
sorting/tagging is inevitable if you shoot a lot.

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cranbell127
No thanks. Lies are a bad business model and a worse life model. Makes one
think wepay.com's sense of ethics all boil down to whether it makes them money
or not.

~~~
aberman
um, the business model I recommend is building products that solve real
problems and charging people a fair price to use it.

Testing ideas has nothing to do with determining a business model. Not sure
how this relates to WePay's ethics or whether it makes us money or not.
Bizarre.

~~~
prodigal_erik
> Testing ideas has nothing to do with determining a business model

Your business model includes how you're going to cover the costs of market
research. This answer boils down to "we're going to trick people into doing it
involuntarily for no compensation, throwing chaff into the marketplace as a
negative externality", whether or not they think of it that way. Dry testing
is just a step short of fraud, and I for one won't deal with anyone who has
ever been caught doing it.

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brlewis
Lying to potential customers is cheap in terms of development time, but costly
in terms of reputation.

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kqueue
This is exactly what mark zuckerberg did. [sarcasm]

IMHO, you invalidate an idea after you implement it and see the user's
reactions. Before then, you cannot know if it will succeed or not.

~~~
aberman
I named fb as a counterexample. I think you can definitely succeed without
validating or invalidating your idea first, but it's a much bigger risk, and
you are building a very specific kind of company. How many facebooks and
twitters are there in the world?

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kirinkalia
This piece succeeds because it spells the steps out clearly _and_ tells you
there are three very big counter-examples. So if you're trying to change the
way people spend time and/or communicate, how do you get validation?

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auston
You guys should work on formatting your posts, bold list titles or italicize
or underline - I am too lazy to read everything, I want to skim before I
decide to read.

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riffer
<http://summarity.com/bookmarklet_front>

~~~
vog
That's a great idea and a nice tool. However, I personally found the resulting
summary not very useful.

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evgeny0
Instead of saying "the solution to problem X will actually be available
TONIGHT at www.[startupname]ly.com" couldn't you say "the solution to problem
X will be available SOON/LATER/NEXT YEAR at www.[startupname]ly.com. Pre-
register so we can let you know when it is" ? First, you wouldn't be deceiving
anyone. Second, wouldn't it be an even better indication of interest if people
are willing to wait for the product?

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rokhayakebe
To everyone who has a problem with _tell them that the offer is
oversubscribed_ , you do not have to take one sentence and turn it into a huge
deal. If that is what the author wants to say, then so be it, just suggest
something better and that may work.

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isomorph
regarding the lying:

didn't bill gates lie to ibm when they were looking for an OS and say he had
one (and then bought qdos and hacked it into dos)?

think of what a boon microsoft has been to the world (i'm only half facetious)

from a utilitarian - the only nonreligious, rational morality? -
perspective...

~~~
philwelch
Utilitarianism isn't the only nonreligious, rational perspective on morality.

Actually, there aren't any _purely_ rational perspectives on morality, as they
all seem to hinge on preserving some intuition or another. But in terms of
logically consistent, secular ethical frameworks which produce results most of
us are comfortable with, utilitarianism isn't the only one on the list. And
there are actually points where utilitarianism might end up producing results
people _aren't_ comfortable with (such as kidnapping people and killing them
for their organs).

~~~
isomorph
point taken

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lhnn
These are interesting ideas. I'd like to hear from any founders who have used
any of these methods, and to what extent they were beneficial in gauging the
eventual level of success of an idea.

~~~
withoutfriction
I agree. And on that topic, what are some hair on fire problems that you have
or have thought others might have?

