
Here's What Happened When I Tried to Pre-Sell My Startups Product - paultowers
http://blog.taskpigeon.co/pre-selling-startup-idea/
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danieltillett
Paul I have taken a look at your product and I think the problem is that you
are still far from a minimum viable product. Sometimes you just have to invest
quite a bit of resources before you have a product that people want to pay
for. Lean is good, anorexic is not.

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paultowers
Hi Daniel,

Thanks for your feedback.

We have done detailed research on other products on the market and our
solution is comparable on all of the core features. Perhaps this isn't
articulated clearly enough on the landing page so I will definitely look into
this.

We are launching our private beta in January 2017 and are already using it
internally for our own task management so it is a functioning product.
(Obviously needs ongoing refinement based on user feedback).

The purpose of the pre-sale experiment was to really take people who had
already expressed interest in Task Pigeon and to test their receptiveness to
paying for the product. As I'm sure you would know many successful
founders/VC's do suggest trying to pre-sell your product as a form of
validation.

While we didn't do this before starting the development work, we still thought
it would be worthwhile to test our pre-launch subscribers with this campaign.

Thanks again for your feedback. I do appreciate it and will revise how we are
articulating our feature set.

Paul

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danieltillett
It is always a bit of a judgement call as to when you have a MVP or not. I am
a little biased towards ‘fat’ MVPs as I think people have started going to far
towards lean and they end up releasing something that does not provide much
customer value.

My advice for what is worth is focus on getting high quality beta testers who
will give you the feedback you need to improve the product and leave paying
customer until later.

