This is great advice, does anyone have some resources on how to pre-sell or pre-validate a product without much to show? I mean, I've always tried but if you describe something to someone and say "do you want this? Will you pay $20 for this?" they always say, "cool! sure!" and then don't answer when you come collecting product in hand.
Another option is the concierge delivery method. This works for some ideas better than others. Eric Ries (and many others) go into greater details. Basically, you manually deliver the service. So, if you were a grocery delivery service, maybe you would find some potential customers and have them submit a Wufoo form with their grocery order and then you would fulfill it. Skillshare did this (http://www.mikekarnj.com/blog/2011/08/01/how-to-launch-your-...).
patio11 has a good description on his site kalzumeus.com of how he market tested Appointment Reminder before he sold it to his customers. Sorry, don't have the link on me, but his whole site is pretty chock-full of good advice on selling software. Going through his lifecycle email course now, learning a lot.
Here's the meat of it, reposted from an HN comment since it is my most succinct account of the story:
A spiritually similar example: Appointment Reminder didn't actually exist in summer 2010, but I had a two-page demo of it set up. I got $400 out of an ATM when I went home to Chicago to visit, and just wandered around the Gold Coast/Magnificent Mile region of the city looking for every hair salon and massage therapy practice I could find. I asked them all if I they took walk-ins and, if so, could I have 30 minutes of the owner's time for whatever the rate was ($30 or so). In lieu of the shoulder massage/etc, I said "I'm interested in the massage therapy industry. Would you mind if we just chatted for half an hour about it?" And I asked about how they handled scheduling, appointments, no-shows, etc etc. I also did a demo of my two-page AR mini-app on the iPad and asked if they would be interested in buying it when it was ready.
I think only one person actually accepted my money for the interviews. I got five-ish "Please tell me when that is ready" out of a dozen or so conversations. No Bay Area or signup form required. (I put their emails in a paper notebook. And lost it prior to launch. Whoopsie.)
This was mostly successful for me: it confirmed that there was a market willing to pay for AR without me needing to actually build it to demonstrate that. (My sampling technique, which found only massage therapists/hair salons, did sort of lead me off the rails as to who I'd eventually end up targeting for most of the business. D'oh.)
The basic premise is you set up a landing page that sells your product or service, and after someone clicks "buy" "add to cart" or "sign up" you count that as a conversion.
Drive initial traffic to test via PPC in order to avoid social bias.
You could do the "not yet open for business". That's a little rude.
The polite thing to do is say, "Great! That product isn't ready yet. We'll contact you when it is. What's your email?"
Or you could say, "Hey, we're still working on this. Could we contact you to find out what's most important to you about this product?"
Another option is just to flash an error message and redirect them back to Facebook or Google or wherever they came from. They will pretty much instantly forget about you: things are broken all the time on the web. That's kinda lame, though, so I'd generally lean for something that invites further engagement.
