Ran 12 interviews over three weeks. Every single one said the problem was real, ten of them said $29/month was reasonable, four said they would "definitely" buy it.
Put up a preorder page - real Stripe checkout, $19/month, first month charged now, cancel any time, shipping in six weeks. Emailed all 12 personally. Zero cards.
So either interviews are worthless or I ran them wrong. Which is it?
There is also a sequencing problem. You asked for money for something that does not exist yet, with a six-week date, from people who have known you for three weeks. That is a big ask even from someone who genuinely wants it.
Charge for the outcome instead, done by hand, this month. "I will do this for you manually for the next four weeks for $50" is a real transaction that tests real demand, gets you paid, and teaches you the workflow you are about to automate. If nobody buys the manual version, the automated one was never going to sell either.
Offered exactly this to the four who were most enthusiastic. Two ignored it, one said they would think about it, one paid. So my real conversion is 1 in 12 and the product is four weeks of my evenings doing it by hand, which is worth knowing before I write any code.
Worth being precise about the sample. 12 is small, and 0 of 12 could be bad luck at, say, a true conversion rate of 10%. But 0 of 12 at a 34% discount from the price they named is much stronger evidence, because you removed the objection they gave you and nothing changed.
When you drop the price and nothing moves, price was never the objection.
One mechanical thing before you conclude anything: did you watch the checkout? If three people opened it and none completed, that is a different failure from nobody clicking the link at all. Preorder pages break in boring ways - a card form that fails on mobile, a currency that surprises people, a "charged today" line nobody expected.
Check who you interviewed. In a lot of businesses the person suffering the problem and the person who can spend $29 are different people, and enthusiastic interviews with the first group tell you nothing about the second. If you were talking to operations staff about a tool their manager buys, everything they said could be true and still produce zero cards.
the phrase "would definitely buy" has cost more engineering hours than any single framework decision in history.
@psu_paula · 2mo ago · 3 replies
You ran them wrong, in the specific way almost everyone runs them wrong: you asked about the future.
"Would you pay $29 for this?" is a question about a hypothetical, and people answer hypotheticals with kindness. There is no cost to saying yes to a stranger about a thing that does not exist.
The questions that predict behaviour are all about the past:
Someone who says "we pay a VA six hours a month to do this by hand" has told you the price. Someone who says "$29 sounds fair" has told you they are polite.
Your preorder page is not the failed experiment here - it is the one that worked. It gave you a clean answer in a week. The interviews were the broken instrument.
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@interval_ida · 2mo ago
"Annoying but not paid for" describes about 90% of software ideas, mine included. The filter I use now is simple: if they cannot name what it currently costs them in money or hours, there is no budget line to move into.
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@clay_bertram · 2mo ago
Went back through my notes. Not one of the 12 was currently spending money or meaningful time on this problem. They all agreed it was annoying. That is the whole story and it was in my notes the entire time.
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