[alangibson]

I've been around the horn a few times on this. Anything short of a commitment to pay for the product (up to and including prepayment) is just noise. It's not so much that people lie about what they say they would do, but that it's too easy for you to lie to yourself about the signal you're actually getting.

Here's a good example:

> Though a lot of people I spoke to sounded "excited", I got very few signups. (They're not my target audience, so I didn't ask them if they'd pay for such a product)

Those people weren't in your target audience, and you didn't ask them to pay, but I presume you take it as a positive sign that this particular audience was "excited." But it's not. It's not anything since they're not even potential customers. That's how we subtly deceive ourselves.

Talk directly to people in your target audience (contact on social, then move convo to email, then move convo to telephone) and try to get them to put some skin in the game. One popular tactic is to offer a free feature request for a refundable prepayment.

[toss1]

Yup, one friend who had a pre-internet sw biz with many different smallish products (think utilities) told me an interesting story.

He started out describing a proposed product and asking if people would be interested and buy it. "YES", no question they liked the idea and would pay money for it. So he went and built it. No takers, lots of "maybe later"s.

After a few rounds of that losing game, he started asking not what they wanted, but about specific pain points - 'What is most inconvenient about this?', 'does this task consume too much of your time?', 'what is the biggest time-waster?', etc.. When he listened and built products addressing the complaints, he'd make sales on the first call, even tho no one ever actually told him they were interested.

I'd suggest for OP to design a question list around things solved by the proposed product, and related work. Do not tell them that you are working on a product. Talk to prospects and see if those are true pain points - and try to get them to say they're just fine - avoid politeness & confirmation bias (i.e., you really don't want to fall for a few ppl being nice, agreeing that it's a problem, then building something they don't care about}.

So, if you try to convince them that there is no problem, and they insist that there are no workarounds, they've searched and it's a PITA that costs them money, then you are on to something.

Edit: typos

[dotvignesh]

Will give this a shot, thanks!

[toss1]

Good luck!

[chrisseaton]

To be honest if anyone outside of my work showed me their product idea I'd at least pretend to be 'excited' about it just to be polite.

[kbos87]

In retrospect I’ve semi-unknowingly done this, and I regret it.

The parent comment is right. There are two useful outcomes - they are willing to take their credit card out, or they are willing to give you direct feedback. Everything else is noise.

[muzani]

What "excited" really looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnB1TgxgwEA

[dotvignesh]

Agreed! I've been trying to reach out to content creators, but the problem is they mostly ignore since they get so many such requests. That's why I wanted to know how you get over it when your distribution is bad. Thanks for the suggestions!