I like this talk a lot. It's a very important goal to get the minimum done to start testing and to start getting feedback on. However, one dangerous thing I think communicated here is, and I paraphrase, "just put an ad on adwords to a page describing something and see if you get click troughs or signups".
Jason Fried at 37signals has spoken a few times on how little business they got from adwords (might still be the case). I remember comments from him 2+ years ago, that their adwords account was just kind of forgotten about.
Since a very tiny minority of their customers ever come from adwords now, I wonder how much smaller that would be if it was just a signup form and a few bullets of what Basecamp was going to be.
The point is, if Jason Fried had created Google adwords ads 3-4 years ago about what Basecamp was going to be before they started even putting a couple weeks into it, it sounds like he would have had a false negative.
Don't get me wrong though. I'm pointing to more about the problem with relying on adwords than the overall philosophy of the method.
Afterall, 37signals uses their blog to do this technique instead of adwords. They would leak out stuff about CRM and Sunrise many months before they ever finally had Highrise out for sale. I'm sure they got tons of great feedback on their blog and people clamoring for "yes give me simple crm!" as a strong positive signal that they were on the right path of a lucrative product.
So yes, get the minimum done and start testing on it. Just don't solely rely on taking a Google Adwords ad out though.
I recently was on a panel at the University of Illinois talking about entrepreneurship and Inkling. I was with Keith Schacht, one of the original founders of Inventables, and now he's doing craftedfun.com. He 's also religious about testing early concepts. I love a story he had about how he had an idea about some kind of mobile application the employees at a bar would use.
So right then and there he drew some stuff on paper, then went to 3 local bars near his house and asked to talk with a manager. He then bugged them each for a few minutes about his drawings on paper. And from those conversations he decided not to execute on those ideas. Sure this took balls, and he's crazy like that :)
But we all could be doing this more. And probably know someone who we could probably be bugging about something we drew on paper who could reasonably be a future customer, before we commit too much of our precious time on code and marketing.
I think when Eric talks about taking out Google Adwords for testing, he means to do it in the way that "The 4 Hour Work Week" by Timothy Ferriss uses it. He uses Google Adwords as a mechanism to test his ideas and lays out certain criteria to measure success.
37 Signals already had a product when they bought the adwords. These guys are talking about buying a small amount of adwords and using a fake signup page to test a need, before the product even exists.
Right, sorry I wasn't clear, I was only using their more recent adwords success (or lack thereof) now to extrapolate what their success would be on "buying a small amount of adwords and using a fake signup page to test a need, before the product even exists.".
If adwords isn't so good for them now that they have a fully functioning product and well known brand, can you image how much less successful running an adwords campaign would have been for them 3-4 years ago before Basecamp even existed.
It would have probably sucked, and if Jason only listened to this hypothetical adwords datapoint would he have said, "you know what, our adwords account isn't driving anyone to our fake signup page, we better not build Basecamp"?
There's a story of a guy who wanted to sell cars online. But what a huge system to write, and he didn't know if it would work or not. So he made a website with forms etc, but manualated the entire back-end by hand. The backend was a mock up. This have him the feedback that the business could work.
But this approach needs ideas that people can recognize that they want. There's the story of the early xerography (xerox) process being sold to IBM - but they carefully assessed the need for it and declined:
There's the story of the early xerography (xerox) process being sold to IBM - but they carefully assessed the need for it and declined:
Similar story, different area - Pixar was nearly sold to Microsoft even after Steve Jobs had signed the deal with Disney to produce Toy Story in 1991, as Jobs was worried about the companies finances.
Haha I knew there had to be a name to the trick of "launching' something without having it built. I use it all the time. ie. Before we added a games section to our site, I just put a "games" link up in the navigation to a blank page to see how many people click on it overnight.
Lots of interesting ideas in the talk. I think the biggest thing stopping companies (and even startups) from experimenting is some measure of success. As soon as you find something that's sort of working, it is hard to continuously experiment with any other products and features, but that is sorta the key here. Don't fall into that trap.
Keep innovating, because that's what people are expecting from you, otherwise there's no difference between the 800lb gorilla in the room and you.
Also, if you keep challenging the people you're working with to come up with new and interesting ideas, they're going to be much happier.
