I can see the appeal of doing this, and for things like UI design it makes alot of sense, but it seems too easy to cross ethical lines. Theranos basically did this, though of course on a vastly larger scale and over a longer time period. In the beginning, it's easy to tell ones self that filling in the gaps will come naturally once funding and interest are available. when there are difficulties executing on promises, it creates a choice between perpetuating the dishonesty for a low cost, or coming clean for a much higher cost. As time goes on, the feedback continues until there is some kind of breaking point. If you're going to do this, you had better be damn sure you can deliver, and have some sort of pre-determined go/no-go points to prevent things from getting out of hand.
Proving that fraud has taken place requires the perpetrator to have committed specific acts. First, the perpetrator has to provide a false statement as a material fact. Second, the perpetrator had to have known that the statement was untrue. Third, the perpetrator had to have intended to deceive the victim. Fourth, the victim has to demonstrate that it relied on the false statement. And fifth, the victim had to have suffered damages as a result of acting on the intentionally false statement.
Well, we delivered and the people who signed up got invitation to the beta. This approach is everywhere but we forget somehow look at them differently.
Look at the https://www.tesla.com/cybertruck ... They even collect money, but we are not sure if the whole company Tesla will be here in 2 months. Can we trust that companies will show us only super functioning thing?
It's all in the way you communicate things... People should never feel fooled, but you can show them something that doesn't exist yet to start their imagination.
I'm creating an open source todo list + calendar webapp (https://getartemis.app, source at https://github.com/satvikpendem/artemis) made by just me, and I can tell you how I approached the problem.
The video you see on the front page does not exist in code, it is simply a prototype designed with Figma (https://figma.com) and animated with Principle (https://principleformac.com). I created the landing page and video, added a Mailchimp form, and I posted on Twitter, Reddit, and here on Hacker News, the communities in which it made sense. For me, it's a productivity / task management tool, so I would post on reddit.com/r/getdisciplined or reddit.com/r/productivity.
It's all about creating a minimum viable product, as you might well be aware, but what you may not know is that an MVP need not have code. Indeed, it could be a video as I did, and I think for software, a video works best as people can actually see what it looks and feels like, without you necessarily creating the product architecture (full frontend and backend plus devops etc). Now I have over 150 subscribers (edit: now 1100 as of July 2020) in only a month due to rapid creation of this type of MVP, and based on this feedback, I changed my designs, and only now I am beginning to really create the heart of the product.
Using non-code MVPs is the best way in my opinion to sell quickly before building.
I think I'd make a huge distinction between a reasonable demonstration, which may be a video, and a minimum viable product, which must have code associated with it. If it isn't functional, and could not be sold in its current state, then it isn't a viable product.
Sure, I made clear they were just signing up for the mailing list, not the product itself. They're not paying customers but they're an audience I can sell to later. I expect only 10 percent will convert to the paid product, but that's better than 0%, when you have no audience.
Got it, and that sounds perfectly reasonable. I'd describe it entirely differently from an MVP, but it is reasonable to make a demo to judge reactions and see where points of confusion are in how the product will work.
What I did was a "fake door" MVP, as the article states. It is not necessarily intended for directly measuring sales but whether its worth my time to build it in the first place. Having over a thousand sign-ups now, it validates that I should indeed spend my time on it.
Then, I would make a high fidelity one, a "one feature" MVP as the article calls it, which would cut the product down to its essence and see if it can still solve a specific problem, and whether people would still pay for only one feature. I am doing this now with a mobile app instead of web/desktop app as the reduced screen space forces me to think about the problem of time block productivity from its essence.
Perhaps your definitions of MVP are different than others, which is perfectly fine. There are others I've seen over the years like simple, lovable, complete (products), and so on (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955085).
Yeah, I think we are arguing semantics. For me, not being an entrepreneur, the "viable product" portion of MVP seems like it is a useful distinction. In your original post, when you said that you had an MVP that just consisted of a video, I interpreted it as a form of fraud. (i.e. "I sold customers a product that doesn't exist, using a video to fool them.")
This terminology fuzziness is a direct result of SEO. "MVP" = Good Thing in entrepreneurial circles, so things that are not viable products are labeled as such because they want to be associated with that keyword.
I don't think so. Look at the other comments replying to my thread. The definition of MVP can mean finding the fastest way to validate with the least effort, as Eric Ries is quoted in the other comment. Perhaps at one point MVP did literally mean the smallest usable product but now the product does not necessarily need to be usable, it just has to validate a hypothesis.
> And a WIP can mean something I haven't even started on yet. /s
> You're twisting the meaning of the words in the acronym. I really don't care, but it renders the words meaningless to use them that way.
Again, I'm not sure how to explain that MVP does not literally mean an actual product. It's a tool for hypothesis testing, you don't spend time and energy building out your entire product before you show something to customers, that would be a waste of time and energy. That's why I, and others, define MVP as anything that let's you understand something new about your market and eventually you use that knowledge to make a product.
Should words have shared meanings? Otherwise communication collapses. You promoted a mock-up and got interest to motivate building a product. That's great. Why use misleading words to describe it?
As I've stated in my other comments, the words I used such as MVP are not misleading, or at least, they have multiple meanings, such that those who understand what I meant by MVP were not confused as to its multiple meanings, so the communication was clear enough.
I've had the same argument but the origins don't support this as far as I can tell. A landing page can be a MVP. Dropbox is I think the classic example.
It feels wrong to me, but I think it puts me on the same side as those that reply "but there's a server still" on serverless discussions. As much as I may dislike the naming, that's what it means.
An MVP has to be able to satisfy some user demand with a feature. A signup can’t do this (but it can facilitate market validation, which you may be thinking of.)
Read that Wikipedia page with a different mindset and look up the origins of Dropbox.
> , the term MVP is commonly used, either deliberately or unwittingly, to refer to a much broader notion ranging from a rather prototype-like product to a fully-fledged and marketable product.[9]
I remember the origins of Dropbox! Are you maybe thinking that anything that becomes a successful product must be considered an MVP?
The summary section of that article and the elaboration is correct and the portion you pulled out is just an explanation of a non-normative minority practice. The same goes for the other end that reserves the term for an essentially mature product, although for different reasons, since the minimum to actually put features in the hands of paying users can be debated whereas users cannot use a lack of features.
> First, a definition: the minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.
> Some caveats right off the bat. MVP, despite the name, is not about creating minimal products
Hi , I have Your GetArtemis App starred on GitHub. The question is how do You reach out to Your potential audience before You make a sale to them? Where do You find them and how do You convince them to Give out their email address? I am trying real hard to network over LinkedIn and I seem to get a measley 1% connection rate. Not at all scalable.
Genuine question, why is your comment capitalized like this? I assume english is your first language since it seems naturally written, and it's likely not dictated because no program would correctly write "GetArtemis". So how did it end up like that? Weird autocorrect?
The conspiracy theorist in me says it's a way of signaling via the (bunk) neurolinguistic programming philosophy, which suggests that emphasizing certain words will evoke a desirable response. (Personal words like "you" and "your", as well as positive words like "give".)
The theologian in me says this person writes about/to god frequently and thus treats words like "you" as a capitalized proper noun so frequently that it's autocorrected.
The rationalist in me says English is not their first language and spends most of their time writing in their native language which may include different noun forms and so is habitual. And given some spacing and punctuation oddities, possibly an older person.
First, I have some questions for you that once I know the answers I can help you better.
1. What problem are you trying to solve?
2. Who has those problems?
3. Where exactly are they located, both physically or in cyberspace?
Based on your conversation rate, you are probably doing a shotgun approach or not talking to the people you need to be.
Second, based on these answers, do things that don't scale (http://paulgraham.com/ds.html). Actually talk to your customers and figure out what problems they have, and what solutions you can give them. In many user interviews, customers will try to give you solutions but that's not their job, their job is to identify their problems, yours is the job to fix them.
No, I'm not. I've shown you examples of how I'm not, and of how words change meanings, and if you do not believe so, then there's nothing else I can say.
They only signed up for an email list. However, even if they had paid, wouldn't this be the same thing as what Kickstarter does, except not on their platform? Hypothetically, one would offer pre-orders for a service that doesn't exist, then uses the money to make it exist. I don't see anything wrong with that.
> to do around 1500 banner ads. ... We got 6 products in 5 colors and the aim was to create ad banners for 3 countries. The goal was to create 15 formats of each banner ad
Such product exists: Alibaba Luban. It was announced back in 2016 and here's a real world generated example of it:
Thanks for sharing! In the past all graphic materials were done by graphic designers. In Photoshop, there is huge flexibility what you can do. Basically, you limit only yourself what you want to create. And the plugin leverage mostly this.
If you see, Bannersnack basically do the same thing, problem is, that they don't have that reach functionalities as Photoshop has.
Depending on your business model, a sign up can be considered a conversion, or not. If you're selling a subscription service, a sign up would not be considered a conversion, in my view.
Well. I showed them the future tool and if they liked it, they could subscribe. If you call this a lie, then whole Tesla is a lie https://www.tesla.com/cybertruck
+ I haven't collected any money from people.
What would you say on Kickstarters? When they are just in "prototype" phase and they even not sure if they can deliver? And they are even collecting money.
I get tired of these startups thinking they can just throw up videos of non-existent products and get signups as some kind of validation.
Consumers patience will wear thin when they find pretty much every new startup pulls the same crap, until interest in new startups reaches all time lows and this strategy doesn’t work anymore.
Then the only way to validate things will be the old fashioned way: take a risk and build shit up front. If it doesn’t sell that’s your problem, the consumer doesn’t care. Not everyone is entitled to cheap and easy validation.
> I get tired of these startups thinking they can just throw up videos of non-existent products and get signups as some kind of validation.
Why? I'd suggest they take it one step further: Offer discounted pre-orders and use that to measure if people are interested. The only way to be sure that someone is willing to pay for what you're building is to ask them to pay for it.
> Then the only way to validate things will be the old fashioned way: take a risk and build shit up front.
This is bad advice. You should never take on risk that you don't have to. A startup is full of anticipated and unanticipated risks, there is no reason to expose yourself to even more.
For reference, we tried your approach at my first startup. We built something people found really cool but that no one wanted to pay for. We wasted eight months doing this.
Our next product was launched with minimal tech investment (1-2 weeks of development) and accepted pre-orders. We made $x,xxx this way and things went very well. If we hadn't sold enough we would have refunded all of our pre-orders and chose to work on something that people actually wanted.
As a consumer, you want startups to build stuff up front. That way you can immediately tell if they executed correctly and you want to spend money.
Startups though don’t want to build shit. They want to pass on the risk of a failed product to the consumer. They’ll get consumers hopes up and then say “whoops, not enough people wanted this so we’re not building it too bad”
This is also why even if you do build something people might not even use it until you reach a certain level of success because consumers don’t want to invest time and money into some product that can disappear overnight.
honestly, i've stopped paying attention to products that startups fake launch. i'm sure im not the only one and also not the only one that's worked in the sphere and realizes just how poorly built/thought out everything is. moviepass is a prime example. your sign up pages that lead to nothing/nowhere because you got demotivated or too lazy or didn't find funding or the other plethora of reasons are exactly why i ignore them all and close out of the tab. your "secretive" coming soon pages are stuck in 2013. if this is a product that is serious/legitimate, then i'm sure i'll hear about it through friends, HN or TC or something. i'm starting to think that the "startup" field is mostly populated by people who do it just to put "CEO/Founder" in their linkedin bio.
There's nothing fake about this though. I work at a thriving startup and we share videos of upcoming features and prototypes with customers and prospects pretty regularly.
Ultimately, we want to build the product our customers want and our customers want us to build them a product they want. This type of stuff lets us iterate significantly more quickly.
A designer can mockup complex features in hours/days. Dev time would be days/weeks. In a week, we can iterate with a customer to get them a feature they want. It'd take months to "just make it" and get to the same point.
We already have a core product so that's already consistently delivering value. If we don't deliver on one thing, it's likely because we're improving value elsewhere.
>I get tired of these startups thinking they can just throw up videos of non-existent products and get signups as some kind of validation.
me too.
It triggered myself into pondering whether or not humanity will ever actually become less responsive to advertising as a whole simply because of previous experience -- but then I brushed the notion aside, figuring that advertisement psychology is more-or-less all-powerful.
Feels a little odd using a massively successful example from a decade ago, with it still being used as a technique with success to say patience will wear thin.
Imagine a world where every new product you see may or may not exist, because validation tests are rampant. Until you’re actually using the product yourself you’ll never trust that it’s real.
I'm sure that if your product is "hot" enough, and checks all the trendy boxes, a fake video / pitchbook will not only yield signups, but actual investor money.
Right so that is called "lying". I mean it's the worst form. Normally people at least say it's "coming soon" or something. Rather than just falsely saying it exists.
Although tangential to the point of the article, interestingly enough, this product does exist to some extent. A really talented developer that I used to work with has created a pretty neat Figma plugin to generate production ready ad banners on the fly (https://www.figmaticapp.com/bannerify). I have no financial benefit to sharing this - just a fan of his work.
I know its very important to validate the Idea before starting the work, and such videos are great way to do that. But I strongly believe such videos must embed some sort of information like "Conceptual working of Future product" or "Video represents the basic concept of our targeted product".
These types of info/notes will high likely give you the list of possible future buyer using the forms like "Add to wish-list","Be the first one to know when we release".
While I was posting this to the groups, I spoke to people and I told them the facts about that, if they asked. Nobody was pissed off, everybody was happy, that somebody was solving their pain.
In-person discussion is always a key to understand the client needs.They will surely be glad to discuss their problem because they are searching for some solution.
