[rfrey]

I believe you are entirely correct: it is testing an idea rather than testing and iterating on features. That's the point: people who love programming might skip directly to testing features without testing the idea. Testing the idea is essential and can be done 10x faster and cheaper than testing the first feature.

[AlchemistCamp]

Okay, let's take Roblox as an example since they're about to IPO. They've clearly made an incredible product and built a developer ecosystem around it.

When they were starting several years ago, how would have tested "the idea"?

[tbran]

Instead of asking, "How do I test Roblox?", I'd ask:

"Is my idea testable with the time/runway I have?"

Assuming the context of a solo dev that just wants to make money: info products, simple apis, or simple apps should be easier to test.

I think that doing lots of small projects and launching them is probably better than working on "the one thing" - until one of them becomes "the one thing". This gives you more opportunity to test ideas and test marketing (which is probably more important than your idea). The canonical example of this is probably Pieter Levels [1].

Let's call this the "Test with Teeny MVP" [2] method as a opposed to the "Test with Landing Page" method. Important note - I suspect that testing with a teeny MVP is easier than a landing page when you don't have an audience. Interesting tweet on that from Rob Walling [3]:

"Out of nearly 1600 applicants to @tinyseedfund we chose 23 exceptional companies to fund. Of those 23, one (maybe two if you stretch) built an audience before launching their SaaS.

Audience helps, but so much less in SaaS. I've been beating this drum since 2012."

[1]: https://levels.io/12-startups-12-months/

[2]: I'm sure that someone will point out that "Teeny" is redundant here. :)

[3]: https://twitter.com/robwalling/status/1306591312498405376

[AlchemistCamp]

> Instead of asking, "How do I test Roblox?", I'd ask:

> "Is my idea testable with the time/runway I have?"

I'm already ramen profitable with what I'm doing. The vast majority of my ideas are not ideas for new businesses, though a few are.

The idea I'm testing in this thread is, "looking at successful businesses, how would rigid Lean Startup practices have worked in their early days?"

Tinyseed isn't terribly interesting to me in this context since they have a very narrow SaaS focus, none of them have had an IPO and Rob has a large podcast he uses to promote the companies. It's a great strategy on his part, but it makes it much harder to figure to know how much the success of companies they invest in is due to their ideas.

Something similar could be said of Jason Calicanis's launch.co, though I bet it will have some massive wins in the next few years.

[fny]

They could have put out a site with videos of the product and experience akin to what Nikola did with their trucks.

Vaporware is an extremely common tactic in sales.

[AznHisoka]

Lots of market research, surveys, and analysis of market trends. And then you build and hope that analysis translates to customers.

Most people here have the right intention on testing your idea/concept before building, but they forget the world is 100x more competitive than it was 10 years ago. All the low hanging fruit ideas are gone. Yes you can obviously test some ideas easily but most of them were executed already.

To succeed now, you need to tackle the “high hanging” fruit ideas/problems and a lot of those simply involve more complexity/building and are not as easily testable via a prototype. Instead you need to invest more into market research before you build a huge chunk of it (while continually doing more market research along the way)

[chris11]

Roblox's history actually goes back decades. In 1989 Dave Baszucki cofounded Knowledge Revolution and created Interactive Physics, an educational physics simulator. Seeing how students used the software inspired him to cofound Roblox in 2004.

[cinntaile]

That's just survivorship bias though. A lot more ready-coded ideas fail which means a lot more wasted time (if making money is the point). I agree that not all ideas can be tested that way, some ideas just have to be experienced. For the ones that can be tested in their idea phase, it seems like a good way to prevent doing too much when the interest just isn't there. At the same time you'll probably miss out on some ideas that need a bit of a runway first, but you're minimizing for downside risk instead of maximizing for upside potential.

[AlchemistCamp]

How is my question survivorship bias?

Other than the sense that any question asked is one of a multitude of candidate questions that "survived" the decision process and made it out into the world, I don't see how asking how a company's "idea" may have been tested is survivorship bias.

[cinntaile]

You are right, that sentence and the one after that are irrelevant. My mistake!

[AlchemistCamp]

No worries!