Ask HN: What is your process when you have a product idea?
First you have to find your market. Do not listen to anyone execpt your target audience. Stuff like &quot;your grandma need to understand your product in 10 sec&quot; is the most stupid advice I hear. Your market should see your value in less than 5 min.<p>Usualy the validation goes in 2 phases : market interest and MVP.<p>The first phase is about faking it until you make it. Create your landing page presenting your product (don&#x27;t spend more than a day on it, you don&#x27;t care about design&#x2F; branding), post in your audience&#x27;s facebook group, go to their meetups, shadow them to affine your concept. The goal is to have proof of traction and the assurance the market is ready &#x2F; big enough. The best metric is usualy an email list you can reuse later.<p>Second phase, if the first is successful is building the MVP (main viable product). It&#x27;s about having the most minimalistic version of your product that you can sell. Usually it&#x27;s your main feature. You MUST hack it yourself, don&#x27;t spend money yet, you&#x27;ll lose it. The goal is to iterate quickly to have what&#x27;s called a product market fit.<p>Product market fit is when you can write an equation like : &quot;when a number P people see my product, there is a conversion of C% that get me X money&quot;. Then you can launch and the rest is about scaling.<p>Do not spend any money (aka &gt; 1000$) until the product market fit. Not in ads, not in freelancers, not in consultants and especially not in PR.<p>If you product is expensive to make or need a big chain of production, sell it before building it. If you succeed it will be you proof of product market fit<p>It&#x27;s difficult to make a standard advice since it depends a lot of the context but key insights are :<p>Your market is king, refer only to them.<p>Make them believe 80% of the job is done when you really just have a landing page<p>When proof of traction hack the main feature of the product and sell it.<p>If you have a product market fit, congratulation you have a business &#x2F; startup.