[BizarroLand]

This is just a system to bilk money out of people.

Midway down https://whatif.xkcd.com/23/ will explain how terrible an idea this is:

If everyone put little turbine generators on the downspouts of their houses and businesses, how much power would we generate? Would we ever generate enough power to offset the cost of the generators?

—Damien [a house uses rain that falls on its lid to run a turbine]

A house in a very rainy place, like the Alaska panhandle, might receive close to four meters of rain per year. Water turbines can be pretty efficient. If the house has a footprint of 1,500 square feet and gutters five meters off the ground, it would generate an average of less than a watt of power from rainfall, and the maximum electricity savings would be:

(math that works out to $1.14/year)

The rainiest hour on record occurred in 1947 in Holt, Missouri, where about 30 centimeters of rain fell in 42 minutes. For those 42 minutes, our hypothetical house could generate up to 800 watts of electricity, which might be enough to power everything inside it. For the rest of the year, it wouldn’t come close.

If the generator rig cost $100, residents of the rainiest place in the US—Ketchikan, Alaska—could potentially offset the cost in under a century.

[mikegreenberg]

You've missed my point or didn't read it. This is not about the market fitness of the idea/product. This is about the parent commenter throwing shade on the inventor's curiosity and aspiring entrepreneurial effort. Regardless about how right you or the parent is about the products fitness, making assumptions about the inventor's motive removes the opportunity for the inventor to learn/grow from their attempt at going to market.

Instead, it would be better to support the inventor with constructive criticism... how they might better measure PMF, how they might prove whether there's a need for their idea in the market earlier, or how they might get more efficiency out of their approach.

And if you don't have the criticism to offer, you can probably find a better way to share your knowledge without saying the idea is terrible or they are acting in bad faith. (Or just don't comment at all!)

[BizarroLand]

Basic test for "Is this a good idea" is to check to see if someone else has already had this idea or one that is similar, and if they have ever executed on the idea, and how did that go.

So they shared their idea, and I showed them that Randall Monroe has already done the math and shown that the idea is dead in the water due to the extremely small amount of energy available to be extracted from rainwater on roofs.

If they didn't know this, hopefully they will stop here and pivot to something else.

If they did know this and made a functionally terrible but somewhat flashy looking website in order to sell this device anyway, then they are just looking for a sucker to bilk money out of.