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?
"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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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).
I'm sure one person, after hearing your idea, ran home and immediately started working on a competitor.<p>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.
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.<p>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)
I would have assumed you had a plan before you stood on the corner asking questions. Maybe you decided:<p>- 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<p>Now, did the results of your experiment meet the criteria for your test and if so, were the responses actionable?<p>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".
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).<p>And yeh, if your idea is any good then:<p>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<p>So it doesn't matter if everyone knows it, the main thing is whether you can do it better than anyone else... see Zynga :)
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 <a href="http://askyourtargetmarket.com" rel="nofollow">http://askyourtargetmarket.com</a> (lean startup bundle). The feedback from AYTM was overwhelmingly less positive.
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.
Asking people whether they'll use your product or not will not help because people don't know what they want.<p>Create your product and only then you'll know.