| I wonder about this as someone working a small indie software business rather than a startup. Most of the replies here seem applicable only to products offering new capabilities, as opposed to products intending to be better implementations in existing categories. The problem I see is I can say, "My product is like X except it's more usable/efficient, less buggy, and looks nicer," —but they'd have to take each of those claims purely on faith, so it's not very useful. Thinking about it more, maybe it's impossible by definition to pre-validate this kind of product: your offering is strictly in the implementation (not some abstract new feature concept), so the validation has to take place with respect to concrete details of the product's realized form. Maybe the best you can do is take this into account when devising strategy around the ordering of features to develop: e.g. if your claims are on usability or performance, focus on that first. (Then again, seems dubious since most all of the example qualities I mentioned are sort of emergent from the entire product being in place, can't really develop them in isolation...) Any thoughts? |