Painful Lesson: Always 'Show and Tell' Your Product Before You Develop It

anticlickwise | 167 points

You discovered why design comes before development in mature development organizations. Design, fundamentally, is a medium of communication. Creating an explainer video, creating a UI, and creating experiences are all communicating to your users how to interact with your software. Unless your users are also technical, (and sometimes even then,) if you don't know what you're going to say, starting off with implementing how you're going to say it will often lead to failure.

> careful UX and UI

> people we just confused and nobody signed up.

If you believe you did those things by yourself without interacting with potential users, not only were you not careful, but you probably didn't satisfy the bare minimum requirements for a basically functional UI/UX . User interface design and user experience design are two distinct professions with relevant college degrees and career paths. That so many developers think they can just intuit their way through these processes based on osmosis-gained knowledge is exactly why we need designers in the first place.

First, get design input on your new project. That you made something usable enough doesn't mean you can replicate that as you expand. To turn this around, a designer in a technical environment could probably hack together a PHP app that got the job done for simple use cases but it would quickly fall apart upon scaling it up.

Second, get design input on your first project. It's quite likely that your product is genuinely useful but you simply don't know how to communicate that to the user. If you can't do it in an explainer video, you almost certainly couldn't do it through an appropriate interface.

chefandy | 10 months ago

A simple maxim that our investors basically demanded of us was: "Sell, design, build". Accepting that approach had two pretty noticeable benefits:

1) We didn't spend a lot of time building something nobody wanted (which is the main theme of this post).

2) We experimented a lot with our product design because we knew we'd be getting feedback quickly and thus could take interesting risks. There was little "analysis paralysis".

Assuming you are your own target customer (in that you would actually pay money for what you're building) I think it can be too easy to conflate what you want to build ("this is fun/interesting") with what you want ("I need this and am willing part with money to get it").

This thread is a great reminder, so thanks.

ary | 10 months ago

Asking people for their opinion on anything (in my case, it's writing) is an art. Not everyone's opinion is worth listening to. If you throw it out to the general public, you'll get a lot of stupid ones. It's better to pick a few people you respect, who are not uncritical lovers of your work.

But you need to do that. As the creator, you have a blindness that it's impossible to get past all by yourself.

AlbertCory | 10 months ago

There’s a balance to be had. Show your thing too early and it can die. There’s a reason large companies don’t announce everything the moment it’s planned.

ironmagma | 10 months ago

Just because the people you showed it to couldn't imagine using it doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of people out there who desperately want it and would recognize its utility to them.

To other creators: 0.1% of the USA and EU is 777,000 people. OP made a very niche product, hopefully he showed people who need SEO-related products, but if you only need to sell to 10,000 people to make a profit, you might "just" have to find them.

Of course, part of the "product" is telling the right people they need your product. If you can't do that then you haven't really finished the product.

reaperman | 10 months ago

Best growth hacking thing to do now is to make an HN post about lesson learned and to make sure all the links are included. Like the OP.

Later on it should be possible to make another HN post about the impact of the previous HN post on the sign up counts. Make sure to include the links there too.

Dudester230602 | 10 months ago

There was a series of "hackathons" I enjoyed called Startup Weekend. They put much more focus on the business validation by talking to people than they did on the actual hacking portion, but the presentations always had a tech demo component as well. But the overall judging weighed the market validation quite highly. It was an interesting change from the hackathons where you just build a cool tech demo.

https://www.techstars.com/communities/startup-weekend

tstrimple | 10 months ago

I write the simplest incarnation of an idea onto an app, and just share it out with colleagues. I have no expectations. I'd say my hit rate is about 1/5. I consider it very high. It's also that high because my audience is my coworkers and I have a good idea of what they want. It's also that low because I just cobble together stuff that barely works, with the ultimate intent to see if i'd get more questions/requests out of it.

chrispogeek | 10 months ago

What you're describing is called Pretotyping. https://www.pretotyping.org/

docheinestages | 10 months ago

It's a tough balance to strike, especially with hardware. I'd love to be able to put together a preorder page to validate demand for my next McGuffin, but it's very difficult to know specs, cost, and appearance before at least a representative prototype has been tested and quotes obtained from suppliers. And it takes a great deal of time and engineering effort to get to that point.

Of course I could show off something completely different than what gets delivered, but for some product categories, the entire appeal evaporates if the promised specs are not accurate. For example, something like camping equipment goes from awesome to pointless if the final product lacks key promised traits like foldability, waterproofing, low weight, etc. See also Magic Leap's marketing demo, which they ultimately couldn't deliver on within the constraints of a real product.

I think the Lean Startup methodology has a lot going for it, but it's very hard to square with certain products.

PS: Your video is really nice. I'd probably rather use a website that looks like that than one with fancy graphics and animations and formatting. It feels more like a professional tool than a flashy toy.

mitthrowaway2 | 10 months ago

Work backwards quality in Amazon has been degraded to historically low. Now it’s cherry-picking customer pains to fit some narratives for promotion sake or blindly copycat with no core value.

whoevercares | 10 months ago

I would recommend reading both Inspired and Empowered by Marty Cagan to help you think about your product journey. Very relevant to what you'll be building, and personally I found Empowered challenged me in ways that both made me uncomfortable and also better at my job as a Product Manager.

sullivanmatt | 10 months ago

By a similar note, I'm working on a pet project, with no commercial aspirations, but, yea, it would be nice if others eventually use it.

And by that notion, I have lots of ideas, but I must continually consciously reign myself in and try to not fall into a hole for a "nice to have". I don't even have a "have" yet, and would be good to get that finished before we get to the "nice" to haves.

But, I whittle away, pushing another quarter inch forward on my 10 mile journey. I still find myself stuck in a featuritis pothole now and again.

Having a destination document can help keep you on track.

whartung | 10 months ago

Try getting them to put money down for a discount or other incentive. The best signal is paying up; promises are cheap.

esafak | 10 months ago

The way I think of this is validating the problem before investing any time in building a solution.

It's surprisingly easy to build something that no one wants. This is because it's easy to build something that doesn't solve a real problem. For reasons that I still can't figure out, we're very good at fooling ourselves about what are real problems that people experience.

Now when I have a new idea, I force myself to dwell on the question, "What is the cheapest way I can validate that the problem I'm solving is real?" You did that with an ugly prototype and a video. That's quite cheap. Maybe you could've even done it with no product at all!

DtNZNkLN | 10 months ago

It's painful, but a worth failure lesson. I started building my own side-projects. First took months to build while learning new technologies. Previous one took a year to actually code all these fancy features. Added payments, billing pages, etc. Then noone bought the subscription :)

Anyway I learned so much along the way and they say you have to spend thousands of hours to actually become successful in one area. Now I've built a project on 2/3 weeks. I give it a few weeks, then move to a new idea to find a gold mine and start the monetization.

przybytniewski | 10 months ago

Show and tell doesn't always work as he describes it. You can go out and meet with people and describe what you want to build. It might work or it might not.

I've found it far more useful to meet with the target audience. Your sole goal is to find out if the problem exists and if its bad enough they're willing to pay to get it solved.

The Mom Test book is invaluable because whether you get truthful information or not depends on how you ask the questions. Like a lot of things in startups asking the right questions is counterintuitive.

rmason | 10 months ago
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| 10 months ago

This seems like basic marketing. You need to know who is interested in buying the product, why, and what kind of language they use. Microwave ovens are a great example of this. They existed for quite a while, but people rejected them because of the cost and mismatched features. When makers got serious about polling people and demonstrating examples sales of honed products took off faster than any other product before then.

m0llusk | 10 months ago

Alternatively.

1/ Build a thing you want

2/ You've now got a thing you want

3/ ?

4/ Profit

Step 3 is moderately difficult.

JonChesterfield | 10 months ago

I often wonder about this, because I'm in the process of building something and have never shown it to anyone. But it's a developer tool, and I'd be the target audience. So I start with asking myself what I need, with the hope that I can build a really good tool that I'd actually use, and then hopefully others will find it useful as well.

danielvaughn | 10 months ago

The Blackberry movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_(film) includes a few examples of selling something without having anything real behind it.

sgarrity | 10 months ago

I've been guilty in the past of putting lots of effort into building, tuning and polishing something which... well, nobody wanted

Or that nobody was willing to pay for, anyway

Or not enough to make it lucrative

Or heck to not even put it in the general ballpark of being minimally sustainable.

Totally changed my mindset since

syngrog66 | 10 months ago

now do one for single drop at home blood testing

ftxbro | 10 months ago

What you have made isn't a real product in my honest opinion, so it is understandable why you feel this way. You need to make it better and I think you have a chance.

aligajani | 10 months ago

Videos are one of the most important parts of marketing projects. Github projects without gifs get less attention. Humans are visual and don't like scouring through a readme before seeing some action first.

tester457 | 10 months ago

+1 on the working backwards process. I find it useful even for internal demos and scripts that I write. Thinking backwards helps me figure out what the point of the demo is. Why anyone would be interested in it.

asimjalis | 10 months ago

Glad I stopped to read this. Thank you for sharing this wisdom. I’m always so eager to get to making stuff that I could very well see myself making the same mistake.

thealienthing | 10 months ago

Don't blame yourself, even teams in big companies don't bother to do validation and fetch customer opinions before developing the products.

And I know why.

markus_zhang | 10 months ago

Just learn from Theranos being misled by Elizabeth Holmes and her "lack" of mockups.

egberts1 | 10 months ago

Hate SEO.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK | 10 months ago

[dead]

T3RMINATED | 10 months ago