Ask HN: Would you pay to effectively validate your ideas?

7 points by Shynobi 5 years ago | 14 comments

Description: We're building a platform that helps startup founders test if their idea is potentially profitable. Founders communicate with our AI (Valii) about their startup idea, using that information, we create a preorder page and advertise it. Potential customers for the idea can then place a preorder. https://valii.co/

More details: We're almost done with the MVP, aiming for 12th Feb. For the MVP we are excluding the advertising feature and the AI integration. We are instead simulating the AI experience by asking detailed questions and using it to generate the preorder page. We believe the major feature is the preorder validation. Finally you only receive the money for your preorders a few days after you launch, to give your customers a bit of time to confirm their satisfaction with your product/service.

Is this a service you would pay for and why? Any feedback is appreciated!

axelsvensson 5 years ago |

I would greatly appreciate a service that fills this need, but your approach has a bad smell. The second you mention using AI for generation, I'm no longer interested. I'd rather pay 10 times whatever you had in mind and get human help. Make whatever internal tools you want to streamline the process, but don't take the humans out of the loop when it comes to something as important as validating a business idea.

Shynobi 5 years ago | |

The difficulty with using humans is that it's harder to scale and even then humans can also be wrong. So we're thinking of how to improve on it. It's a bit mind recking to be honest.lol

axelsvensson 5 years ago | | |

Well, your customers are mostly going to be human. For instance, I'm a human and I'd love to spend $500 for someone, who knows what they're doing, to coach/guide me over chat/email through the process of validating a business idea in a high quality way. I don't think it'd come down to more than 5h of work.

One way of scaling it that has already been done is to use the customer's humanness, by selling a book. That scales. Now, if the price point is $500 for a small but high quality business idea validation, what can you do that's better than selling a book on how to do it? Could you train coaches, who then can bill over $100/h and let the customer execute on it? Willing customer right here.

Lionga 5 years ago |

How did you validate your idea? With this hackernews post?

Shynobi 5 years ago | |

We spoke to a few founder close friends and others through reddit and indie hacker

Jugurtha 5 years ago |

Have you tried communicating with your own AI (Valii) about your startup idea (Valii), and have it create a preorder page and advertise it given the information you intered? How did that work?

Shouldn't your idea validation platform be able to validate the idea behind it?

usgroup 5 years ago |

In the case of a general product, spending some FB bucks and creating a landing page doesn’t necessarily validate an idea. Perhaps more importantly it doesn’t invalidate an idea if it doesn’t work.

Consider focusing on just physical products which are just sold on Amazon.

Shynobi 5 years ago | |

So we've realised that our solution doesn't really validate the idea, it's just slightly better than using emails. We're thinking of how to better solve it now.

patatino 5 years ago |

Sounds like a chatbot and a landingpage generator? Which is totally fine. How does this leverage AI?

Shynobi 5 years ago | |

We intend to use AI to generate the preorder page and also generate the ads for the preorder page. Primarily, we are offering being able to get preorders for your ideas as a better form of validation.

forgotmysn 5 years ago | | |

why do you need AI to do that though?

madamelic 5 years ago |

You should get rid of the AI and do this as a white-glove service to validate _your_ idea.

Just straight up building landing pages yourself, asking the questions, be the AI yourself before spending too much time on building AI you may not need.

Shynobi 5 years ago | |

That would be a good business but not a good startup as it wouldn't scale well.

madamelic 5 years ago | | |

From experience, you are wasting time in the long-run if you aren't validating your ideas 'the hard way'.

By doing things that don't scale, you can move faster and actually solve the problems your customers have, rather than coming to them with what _you_ think the solution is.

http://paulgraham.com/ds.html