
Ask HN: What is your process when you have a product idea? - jfoucher
I&#x27;d like to discuss how the good people of HN go about this issue.<p>Do you talk to the people around you, do you put up a landing page and use adwords, or maybe you start building the product right away ? Something else entirely ?<p>I&#x27;m mostly interested in the validation phase, but I&#x27;m open to anything that can come up.
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Adrig
First you have to find your market. Do not listen to anyone execpt your target
audience. Stuff like "your grandma need to understand your product in 10 sec"
is the most stupid advice I hear. Your market should see your value in less
than 5 min.

Usualy the validation goes in 2 phases : market interest and MVP.

The first phase is about faking it until you make it. Create your landing page
presenting your product (don't spend more than a day on it, you don't care
about design/ branding), post in your audience's facebook group, go to their
meetups, shadow them to affine your concept. The goal is to have proof of
traction and the assurance the market is ready / big enough. The best metric
is usualy an email list you can reuse later.

Second phase, if the first is successful is building the MVP (main viable
product). It's about having the most minimalistic version of your product that
you can sell. Usually it's your main feature. You MUST hack it yourself, don't
spend money yet, you'll lose it. The goal is to iterate quickly to have what's
called a product market fit.

Product market fit is when you can write an equation like : "when a number P
people see my product, there is a conversion of C% that get me X money". Then
you can launch and the rest is about scaling.

Do not spend any money (aka > 1000$) until the product market fit. Not in ads,
not in freelancers, not in consultants and especially not in PR.

If you product is expensive to make or need a big chain of production, sell it
before building it. If you succeed it will be you proof of product market fit

It's difficult to make a standard advice since it depends a lot of the context
but key insights are :

Your market is king, refer only to them.

Make them believe 80% of the job is done when you really just have a landing
page

When proof of traction hack the main feature of the product and sell it.

If you have a product market fit, congratulation you have a business /
startup.

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jfoucher
So from what I understand, in your own process the first step is a landing
page, then you tell people about it and collect email addresses. And only then
do you start building the product. I assume you then keep in touch with your
prospects to get feed back on what you're building right ?

And yeah I totally get the idea to spend the minimum amount of money until the
market is validated.

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Adrig
For a startup it usualy starts with that. But you can start with a facebook
group, instagram account, mailing list... It can really vary depending of the
idea. The main goal is to not start building in a submarine where nobody know
the concept. If people need it they'll come.

Yeah that's also why you don't want to buy traction : your early adopters will
be way more invested in your product.

But remember, done is better than perfect. The goal is to have your MVP out
there asap. If less than a month idealy. Get feedback over your product >
during building process.

~~~
marktangotango
I've read this type of advice before, but I have a lot of reservations.
Example, I've been sitting on this product idea for over a year. According to
this, I should build the landing page as if it's ready, let people sign up,
then present them with "Thanks, we'll let you know when it's ready!" This
seems weird to me, almost dishonest. Are you sayng this is the message the
website should convey? Or am i misreading?

~~~
lewisl9029
I think the sweet spot is to not outright lie in users faces (which could
definitely lead to a bad first impression and hurt your chances at eventually
converting your leads into actual users), but rather build your landing page
with a CTA that reads something like "Interested? Leave your email here and
we'll let you know when it's ready.", instead of faking a user creation
process and breaking the news to them at the end of the process.

Though depending on your appetite for twisting the truth, you could also make
it sound like you've already built the product, but it's currently in an
invite-only private beta phase, and lead the users into thinking they're
signing up for the private beta by leaving their email. This might be a bit
more effective, and isn't technically an outright lie unless you end up seeing
lackluster interest and decide to ditch the product idea.

~~~
Adrig
Yeah exactly. For more accurate data you want to have a CTA like "get the
product" and then a page where you explain that you are still working on it to
put it out there ASAP. This way the conversion rate can be directly used to
your future calculations. If you use words like "beta" or "waiting list" it
can corrupt your data.

And to answer the previous comment : if a user/consumer have the reaction
"Thank god someone have resolved my issue", then finding that you'll have to
wait is not really a big of a deal. For example a few years back I found this
device to scan your food and have sorted the ingredients. As a coeliac it had
huge value for me. When I clicked on the CTA I found that they were still "in
development", well, can't blame them to work on it, let me know when it's
available. I was a bit disapointed but still exited someone was working to
resolve my problem !

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Ryel
I'm interested in making this into a framework and it's been difficult to say
the least.

The high level things about a startup are very consistent and good candidates
to be fit into a framework. I'm not sure but I think these are just called
unit economics. Things like "Our product is sold for $X because it saves our
customer Y in time". However it's the unknown, and emotional values that I've
found incredibly hard to fit into a framework. I'm fascinated now in seeing if
the way the finance industry calculates risk is in any way a good framework
for startups to assess which features to build.

What I've found to be the hardest questions to answer...

How do I find industry metrics on an industry that doesn't exist yet?

How do I prove people will want something that they don't want right now?

How do I measure emotional value? Tactile sensation(hardware)? UX, UI, etc...

These are the things that startups often believe to be their advantage over
the competition. "Our product is much more fun/easy/fast to use/learn/teach"
But how do we measure that?

The most valuable exercise I've come up with is this question...

How would your user recreate your product, if you're product didn't exist and
they had to piece together the end result with existing technology?

I have a startup right now that creates custom educational podcasts by
summarizing publicly available content (with attribution) to generate entirely
new content and sort the corpus in increasing complexity. If you searched
"Skateboarding", you would get a text document that taught you what
skateboarding is, then the history of skateboarding, and then get into
beginner, intermediate, and advanced skateboarding lessons. This would go
through text-to-voice and be downloaded to your device for offline listening.

Search any topic and you get a 45 minute podcast to listen to on your commute.

In our case, I stepped back and said "Okay... If I wanted an educational
podcast on skateboarding, the first thing I would do is search Google, then
Wikipedia, then I would start going to skateboarding blogs and read them one
by one in increasing complexity. If I wanted to consume this content during my
commute I would take all of this content and copy it into a text-to-voice
service, and download that audio file on my phone for listening offline." I
walked through this entire process and it took me 1 hour to get 45 minutes
worth of audio content.

Peter Thiel says that your solution must be 10X better than the existing
solution.[0]

Unfortunately for me, I think I will need to cut the time it takes to manually
create a podcast by 1/10 and also 10x the quality of the content, which I
don't know that I can do.

Tangentially, I often joke that if the problem your startup is trying to solve
doesn't exist as a meme, than it's not a real problem for enough people.

[0] [http://blog.hypeinnovation.com/peter-thiels-7-questions-
for-...](http://blog.hypeinnovation.com/peter-thiels-7-questions-for-product-
innovation)

~~~
assafmo
Sounds cool. I'd be happy to here more details and maybe contribute. ️

