Best advice I’ve read in a while: http://venturehacks.com/articles/new-york-meetup-awesome
1. Build a minimum viable product. If your market is big enough, it doesn’t matter if you piss of 10,000 customers along the way with a lame minimum viable product. If you’re really worried about your brand, market your product under a different name.
2. Get the MVP into the hands of few people. Use Twitter updates, Facebook updates, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, standing on a corner, blogging, etc. to get your product in front of people and see if they make it to the finish line. If you can’t find 100 customers this way, it won’t do you any good to be on the front page of the New York Times.
3. Iterate your product with these customers through surveys and interviews, until they think your product is a must-have. Yes, they might not embrace your product if you show them something too early —that’s fine. Don’t fear the false negative — just build the next version and test it again.
