[edanm]

I sometimes don't understand why technical people seem resistant to "lean startup" methodologies. It's just the scientific method, applied to build a product! You build hypotheses, then try to prove them, and in the course of this, usually learn more information about the world. That simple.

You think you have a product which is useful to someone? Prove it! Talk to people, ask them, build simple prototypes of the core parts.

You think you know how to sell your product? Prove it! Build out some sort of pipeline, e.g. use a landing page and see if you can get people to it.

Etc.

There are good and bad ways to do this, obviously, and it's not easy. But the basic idea is simple enough - and most of the arguments against it sound pretty much the same as how it would sound for someone to be against scientific experiments and hypothesis testing.

[ericabiz]

I can shed a bit of light into this as a Myers-Briggs INTJ (so common in Silicon Valley it's called the "programmer type.")

I'd definitely rather be behind a computer than out talking to people, especially people I don't know.

And I fear rejection--just being brutally honest. (Most people wouldn't admit that this is a core reason they don't like sales.)

I've gotten a ton better since I've run retail stores for the last 3+ years, and that's pushed me out of my comfort zone so frequently that I'm pretty decent at small talk now. (INTJs tend to hate small talk, and sales can be a lot of small talk!)

I doubt I'll ever get to the point where sales is fun for me like it would be for some of the extrovert types. Still, sales is worth doing as a boundary-pushing exercise and a getting-comfortable-with-rejection exercise.

[zipwitch]

Sometimes it's not about wanting to make money, about wanting to sell, or even about wanting to be useful. It's about having an idea and wanting to make it work. And if fame or fortune come your way as a result, great. But the real motivation is building it and seeing it work. (And maybe watching people go, "Wow! That's so awesome/amazing/elegant/etc!" But as long as you get to build it and it works, that's what's really important.)