Really interesting approach! I can see this being useful. How are you dealing with short/medium-term changes in consumer sentiment, I assume your model is currently fairly static? For example, the results to "Would you buy an e-bike?" might change over time as cities add charge-points or additional bike paths, prices for e-bikes go down, etc. And as a more extreme example, the answer to typical YouGov questions like "Who will you vote for in the next presidential election" will obviously change daily based on a multitude of factors that aren't present in your training data.
It might not matter to users in the sense that they ask themselves what rendering engine Chrome on iOS is using under the hood, but the effects do matter. I get a lot of support requests saying "Your [web] app is broken on my iPhone!", "Right, Safari doesn't support feature XYZ", "I'm not using Safari, I'm using Chrome", "..."
I don't think that necessarily contradicts what the author is saying. Even you describe how these top 10% performers are often underpaid, so in some areas (getting noticed, managing office politics, switching companies to get pay rises) they seemingly "don't know what they're doing". A lot of people are brilliant in one particular area and at the same time fail basic life tasks, even though to someone from the outside it looks as if they've got everything figured out.
By turning it into a nearly-useless system. You can only engage Mercedes' system if a number of conditions are all met:
- The route has to have been pre-mapped by Mercedes
- Only works on highways
- Only in traffic jam-like conditions, i.e. traffic moving slower than 60 kmh (37 mph)
- No construction sites (even a single orange cone left over from prior road works will mean that you can't turn on the system / it will turn off)
Under these conditions, 10 seconds doesn't sound too difficult.
I still think that this is the "saner" approach than calling your product Autopilot and letting the general public beta test it (and driving in traffic jams is annoying so I wouldn't mind using the Merc system), but overall it feels mostly like a PR move to be able to say "we have a Level 3 product on the road". I read an article where Mercedes wanted to demonstrate the system to a journalist and they had to have a second car drive in front of them to artificially create a traffic jam because otherwise it wouldn't activate.
It would be interesting to estimate what dollar value can be ascribed to a x-hour FB outage, both in terms of lost ad revenue for FB itself as well missed conversions/revenue for businesses running ads on FB/IG.
That's super interesting! I can see their study included asking to what extent the participants are experiencing certain negative/positive feelings (which may give some more context), but isn't their core measure of happiness also capped? They use a continuous response scale, but in terms of being capped, it shouldn't matter if it's measured on a 0-100 or 1-5 scale, no? The participants can't be happier than "extremely happy" in their study design as far as I can tell.
During such an early stage, I would do it in an "inofficial capacity" - do you have friends at other companies who work in a similar role as you? I would reach out to them and gauge their reaction, from "sounds like a neat idea" to "oh my god, I literally spend 1 hour a day on this and I've been looking for a solution to this since forever. I (or my boss) would pay for this in a heartbeat!". I've found "The Mom Test" by Rob Fitzpatrick to be great for guiding you along this process step by step. When asking friends, there's the risk of running into something called "interviewer bias", where they will rate your idea more positively simply because they like you (and would have dismissed it if some random stranger had proposed the same idea), so that's something to watch out for if you go down this route. Good luck!
I'd also consider https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast somewhat related to product management. In general, it depends on what you are looking for. If you want to go deeper into any of the areas that PMs deal with, I would look for podcasts in that specific area (e.g. UX, design, marketing, development, ...) rather than a PM podcast.
It really depends on the niche and the type of the business you're planning (e.g. B2C vs. B2B, mostly service-based vs. product-based).
Some of the things that have worked for me:
- Using the Google Ads Keyword Research Tool to get an estimate of search interest for your product/keyword.
- Trying to find people in your network who work in the niche and may have experienced the problem you're aiming to tackle. Search on LinkedIn and sort the results by "in my network". Ask your connection for an intro if you're not directly connected to the target.
- Cold-emailing potential customers and asking for feedback. The response rate for such "what do you think about..." emails is really low, so be prepared to send at least 100 emails to get some meaningful conversations out of it. Spend some time to personalize each email to increase your chances of getting a reply and keep the message short.
- Create a survey where you try to gauge the relevance of the problem you're addressing and whether your solution would actually be helpful. Don't send it out to your family and friends - you need the opinion of your target audience.
I run IdeaCheck.io, where we basically automate the third option - we design a survey based on your idea and send it out to respondents, so you get an impression of whether you're "on to something". We also benchmark your results with all ideas that have gone through our service so far and the respondents provide comments/feedback on your idea.
As you mentioned, most people will jump right in and build a landing page / MVP to see if there's any interest, but that's a time-consuming process and I wouldn't spend any more time than necessary on something that you don't know is actually viable.
Still, you of course have to find out if there are potential customers for your idea. I'm using the following validation process to see if a certain target audience is interested in my idea:
1. I start by actually writing down the problem I'm trying to solve and my solution. A lot of ideas may sound awesome while they're in your head, but seem ridiculous once you transform it from an abstract concept into 2–3 sentences.
2. I then create a questionnaire based on my idea. I'm trying to ask pointed questions where the result will actually help my decision-making process, such as "How often are you facing this problem" rather than "Have you ever faced this problem". You can use tools like SurveyMonkey or Typeform to publish your survey.
3. Lastly, I'll try to identify people who are in my target audience. This is tricky, and taking shortcuts like emailing the survey link to your friends doesn't work - there's something called "Interviewer bias", which says that your friends will rate your ideas more favorably than the general public. It's also to be expected that your friends aren't actually in your target audience for your proposed idea.
Because I've been through this process so many times, I created IdeaCheck.io[0], where we generate a questionnaire based on your idea and use a panel of respondents to gather direct feedback from your actual target audience. You can read more about IdeaCheck in my Indie Hackers interview[1].
Even when ignoring the clunky UI, asynchronous background calls are much slower than in the old version. In almost 80% of cases, I now get a browser alert ("Are you sure you want to navigate away? Changes will be lost") when trying to close the tab a few seconds after performing an action (e.g. starring a message, mark as read). This never happened before and it's super annoying.
> Very classy of you to post this kind of biased and offensive comment.
I don't know how my comment was "biased and offensive", I even said I liked the approach in general? I pointed out factual inaccuracies and things that don't make sense in your landing page copy and sample report, that's all.
> I am not spamming people. I send them a request if they can fill out the survey to help a company. All of the people we contacted agreed to be contacted.
I was using "spamming" in the sense of "mass-emailing people". This introduces a non-response bias.
> the question "How accurately do you think this idea solves the problem?" should explain that.
I still don't understand this question. Does a flower shop _accurately_ solve the need for floral gifts? It's just not a term I would use in this context, but ok, hopefully your survey respondents will understand what it means :).
> Sorry, I can guarantee you that's not what you're doing." - great, how?
Let's suppose I place an order for the following idea "I want to open up a burger food truck next to the AmeriCar Insurance office building in Chappaqua, NY" - this is your example on your landing page. No problem, right? Please don't make promises that you can't keep.
I'm not saying one or the other approach is better - there's definitely a need for both, I just don't think that you can consistently deliver this. Good luck!
I run IdeaCheck.io [0], a similar service. I appreciate competition, but this looks like a quickly thrown together MVP without a real product. Have a look at the graphs on the sample report [1] - it makes zero sense to present this information as a line chart. What is the significance of the 8 other data points on the chart that aren't labeled? What kind of metrics are "accuracy" and "feelings"? "My idea is 50% accurate?"
From the landing page: "Are you opening a burger joint around the corner? Let us talk to the people from the office building in front of it, your potential customers!" Sorry, I can guarantee you that's not what you're doing.
IdeaCheck uses a professional panel provider to find respondents. We negotiated a contract with this provider to provide entrepreneurs with access to the same class of market research that Fortune 100 companies use. We don't make any targeting claims that we can't deliver on. Yes, respondents are paid, but that doesn't incentivize them to be extra nice - they answer multiple random surveys each day (from different companies doing market research) and are paid for their time, not their opinion. In general, I like the idea of not paying respondents and actively searching for a small target niche, but at the same time you're introducing a non-response bias (you're spamming hundreds of people to receive 25 survey responses - those who reply aren't an accurate representation of the target audience)
startupsfromthebottom.com looks interesting! Do you come up with the ideas yourself, or what does your process look like?
What you describe (building a landing page or an MVP) is how most people do it. I would start even before that, since you should try to spend no more time than necessary on something that you don't even know is actually viable.
However, you obviously need to find out if potential customers are excited about your idea. In my experience, the following validation process works best:
* Write down a) the problem you're trying to solve and b) your solution. It's tempting to skip this step, but a lot of ideas may sound awesome while they're in your head, however that might change once you transform it from an abstract thought into 2–3 sentences. Try to be as succinct as possible while still capturing the core of your value proposition.
* Create a questionnaire based on your idea. Make sure to ask questions that are actually predictive of whether your idea might take off, such as "How often are you facing this problem" rather than "Have you ever faced this problem". Use a tool like SurveyMonkey or Typeform to put your survey online.
* Identify people in your target audience. This is hard. Don't simply email the survey link to your friends - because of something called "Interviewer bias", your friends & family will rate your ideas more favorably than an idea coming from some other anonymous source. Also, it's highly likely that your friends aren't actually in your target audience.
I run IdeaCheck.io[0], where we generate a questionnaire based on your idea and use a panel of respondents to gather direct feedback from your actual target audience. You can read more about IdeaCheck in my Indie Hackers interview[1].
> Also, please stop spreading untruths. It takes one click to get from the homepage to a list of all interviews ranked in descending chronological order. With some pretty awesome filters as well.
Not true. On mobile, it takes exactly three clicks, as I stated. On desktop, it takes two clicks. What you're probably referring to, the "browse hundreds" link on the homepage (desktop only), is a list of products, which are different from interviews. Please stop spreading untruths (and being so theatrical in the process).
I never discouraged anyone from visiting IH, I just stated the for me personally, the old focus was more valuable.
> the average quality of discussions and answers is higher than on HN
That's just not true. Probably 30% of threads receive 0-1 replies, there's a lot of blogspam, and the community is very homogenous. There's nothing wrong with trying to grow a community, and I love what Courtland is doing in general, I just liked the "old" IH better.
I've had exactly the same experience, but I'm not sure whether the acquisition by Stripe played a role in this. There might be an advantage in having a lively community of people asking for advice if some of them are asking "which payment processor should I use for my project", but I haven't seen that happen frequently. For me, reading about successful startups using Stripe was much more powerful than an off-hand recommendation by an anonymous forum participant.
It would be interesting to read a blog post by Courtland where he shares engagement/views statistics pre and post the decision to make the forum the home page. Maybe there already is such a blog post, but if there is, I wasn't able to find it ;)... But even if engagement increased significantly, I wonder whether that's a good metric to optimize for, for a site such as IH? As it stands, I don't understand the need to pivot if a site is successful.
Agreed. I can fully understand Courtland's motivation to grow a community (to keep people coming back more frequently / to create engagement) and the best way to do this is putting the forum front and center, but at the moment, the community is much too immature to be valuable. Lots of people asking for feedback (often with zero replies), self-promotional articles disguised as advice from first-time side-project creators, and even if there happens to be a lively discussion once in a while, it often feels like 'the blind leading the blind'. The value (for me, at least) of IH was the amazing interviews and podcasts - Courtland consistently pushed out great content that was a joy to read/listen to. Sure, these are still available and I still visit the site at least once a week to check for new podcast episodes, but I stopped reading interviews because they're so hard to get to and it takes 3+ clicks to see which ones are new.
A lot of people will suggest building a landing page / MVP to gauge initial interest, but I would start even before that: Don't spend any more time than necessary on something that you don't even know is actually viable.
However, you need to find out if potential customers are excited about your idea. To find out whether your target audience is interested in your idea, I suggest the following validation process:
* Write down a) the problem you're trying to solve and b) your solution. A lot of ideas may sound awesome while they're in your head, but that might change once you transform it from an abstract concept into 2–3 sentences.
* Create a questionnaire based on your idea. Make sure to ask questions relevant to judging whether your idea might take off, such as "How often are you facing this problem" rather than "Have you ever faced this problem". Use a tool like SurveyMonkey or Typeform to put your survey online.
* Identify people in your target audience. This is hard. Don't simply email the survey link to your friends - because of something called "Interviewer bias", your friends will rate your ideas more favorably than the general public. Also, it's highly likely that your friends aren't actually in your target audience.
I run IdeaCheck.io[0], where we generate a questionnaire based on your idea and use a panel of respondents to gather direct feedback from your actual target audience. You can read more about IdeaCheck in my Indie Hackers interview[1].