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I got feedback on my idea in Palo Alto today. Stupid?

22 points by mkrecny ↗ HN
I literally stood on a street corner in down-town Palo Alto and asked people if they would use my product. One gentleman who claimed himself to be a 'startup guy' seemed to think I was crazy for exposing my idea publicly in PA. Your thoughts?

29 comments

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limedaring
I'm sure one person, after hearing your idea, ran home and immediately started working on a competitor.

Seriously though, the "startup guy" doesn't know much. Stealth mode rarely is useful — more useful is getting information and feedback from potential customers, suggestions from other (knowledgable) startup people, and getting the word out about your potential product to encourage critiques and even more feedback. Keep up the good work.

jakedahn
Why not ask for feedback on HN?
spooneybarger
hacker news isn't a reflective sample of the real world? neither is standing on the street corner but it at least might get you out of the tech/startup community.
limedaring
And gets you outside and off the computer, which most of us should do more often.
carnevalem
I don't think Palo Alto is the best place to do this if that is your goal.
spooneybarger
true there are far better places than Palo Alto, but comparitively, if you want to get outside of the tech community, it is still better than here.
csouth
I think this all depends... I don't know that there is much that can compete with face to face interaction with a targeted "end user." Not sure he got much of that in this case but I think I personally would prefer that "real" interaction with a targeted client in an early stage.
kapauldo
HN has a lot of young inexperienced, overconfident people eager to ridicule you and your idea. It's good for technical feedback, but not great for support or business feedback. I thnk the poster did the exact right thing.
giffo
mkrecny, how would you rate this method of getting feedback?
petercooper
“Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.” — Howard Aiken
kls
That is a great quote that pretty much sums it up. If people are intelligent enough and have the drive to do a start-up it is usually due to passion. Guess what, passionate people think their idea is better than yours and a guy with no vision and a pocket full of money is not going to go through the trouble of stealing a product idea, assembling a team, and building a product. There is plenty of low hanging fruit out there that makes money with little involvement required and those are the opportunities a guy with cash and no vision is going to be looking at.

You run a far larger risk of developing a product, getting good traction and then someone emulating your idea after you have proved the market exists for a product, but when it is an idea on a napkin, it is an idea on a napkin and that's all it is worth. Isolating yourself from early feedback due to fear is the worst thing you can do.

I had an idea for an electromagnetic weight bench once and I have some pretty good connections in the industry. I discussed the idea with the executive group at EAS and Weider, hoping one of them would use the idea as I never had intentions of designing and building it, I just want an electromagnetic weight bench that I can dynamically adjust the weight, with an accelerometer that kills the weight if the bar is dropped to prevent injury.

They all though it was an amazing idea, I even got promises of financial backing if I wanted to pursue it. To this day, I don't have my electromagnetic weight bench because I was too busy at the time to do it myself and my passion lies elsewhere.

My point is, I put a good idea in front of industry leader, they though it was an amazing idea and they still told me, if you want to see it happen then you build it. They where more than willing to put up the money to a person with the vision, but they where not going to pursue assembling the people to make it happen.

farms
Naw, great idea and approach - gotta make sure you do it properly though (I did market research as a student) otherwise results are useless, so if you haven't done that before just check out a few samples and copy their structure (you'll get a bazillion times better results).

And yeh, if your idea is any good then:

a. You're doubtless not the first person to have had it b. As soon as you publicly execute a heap of people will copy you

So it doesn't matter if everyone knows it, the main thing is whether you can do it better than anyone else... see Zynga :)

coryl
"Would you use my product" is really an awful question to ask. At a basic level, sure you get enough responses to see if its worthwhile. But the data is valueless, because its not even close to indicative of whether or not people will pay for it.

People will always tell you "oh sure, sounds like a good idea, I'd use it" because they want to save face and encourage you. There is NO cost to them, real or social, and so they will most often choose that option.

Hell, when I did presales research for a b2b product, I talked with people who told me about their woes, gave great data and indicated that they would pay $X a month for a service that solves their problem. Guess what: none of those people ended up being my first customers, despite telling me they were interested and willing to pay.

I could probably care less about "giving away" my ideas these days, there's just too much that goes on behind execution to care anymore. Entrepeneurs get paid because we deal with problems and bullshit every day; if you want to have the same problems and bullshit I'm facing, go for it. Competition is overrated when it comes to affecting your bottom-line.

That said, just build the damn thing or pretend to have something built where you can measure the amount of people willing to pay for it (not a survey, I mean literal clicks and submissions where people think they're going to go to pay for it).

mgkimsal
Did the OP say anything about people needing to pay to use his product? Would you pay to use facebook? Probably not, but they have hundreds of millions of users. "using" is a good first step to know whether you should pursue something at all. Figuring out how to monetize is next step - users paying directly may just be one method.
coryl
No, the poster didn't say whether or not he was selling a product. But generally, if you have to ask an audience if they'd use your hypothetical free product - you're doing it wrong.
metamemetics
You tell us. Did you get any useful information? It's only stupid or crazy if it didn't work, and genius if it did.

You should turn it into an experiment and try at different times of day and locations (you will get vastly different people shopping in the middle of the day, at a bar, or heading to a wifi coffee shop after work)

bobfunk
Couldn't agree more. We went to Techcrunch Disrupt and got a table in the startup alley for http://webpop.com even though we are not seeking investors and the typical guy there is not really our target.

We were wondering if it was crazy or not, but after a day of spending 9 hours showing our product, explaining what is was all about and pitching the ideas to people we got an amount of information that no doubt made it worth it to us.

As many other say, I don't think exposing your idea or talking to strangers comes with any risk worth planing around, but whether what you did was worth it: I'm pretty sure you already know it yourself by now.

xtacy
Sometimes I think that "Ideas are cheap; show me the end product." (Just like "Talk is cheap; show me the code.")
jaekwon
Depends on the idea and product.
kqueue
Asking people whether they'll use your product or not will not help because people don't know what they want.

Create your product and only then you'll know.

nevinera
Don't ask them if they'd use your solution, ask them if they have your problem.
android2
East Palo Alto or West Palo Alto?
daveying99
Probably West somewhere on University Ave. But East Palo Alto may be more representative of the average population.
ivankirigin
That person you talked to doesn't know what he is talking about. You'll both fail for entirely different reasons. Coffee shops are better than street corners btw. Leave Palo Alto if you want a better slice of real people.
rdj
I would have assumed you had a plan before you stood on the corner asking questions. Maybe you decided:

- how many people you wanted to talk to - the type of people (kids, working adults, homeless, men, women, etc) - the response you were expecting from the interaction - the number of responses you were expecting

Now, did the results of your experiment meet the criteria for your test and if so, were the responses actionable?

I would say you were crazy and wasted your time if you didn't already have an idea of what you were trying to accomplish. Otherwise, I'd say, "Great! What did you find out".

zengr
Use Amazon mechanical turk to validate your idea.
mkrecny
I was on University Av. Essentially I got the impression that most people shy away from giving negative feedback in a face-to-face encounter - so as not to create social awkwardness. I also published at 5 question survey to 200 people asking the same questions I asked in person using http://askyourtargetmarket.com (lean startup bundle). The feedback from AYTM was overwhelmingly less positive.