Screw MVPs and Landing Pages. Your goal is first sale.

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I largely agree, though I'd point out that the landing-page-first approach isn't mutually exclusive with getting paid.

For those interested in seeing an example of how to go about this, our discussion with Michael Benkovich from Anatomonics is a great start:

To validate the idea, I decided to create a true "minimum viable product" (MVP). In fact, I called it an MVT: minimum viable test. The original site was a plain text one-page website with a simple logo and a few iStock images. There was no product to "order", so I added an Aweber opt-in box with the text, "To start your order simply fill in your email below."
Those that filled out their email got the message, "Unfortunately we are upgrading Anatomonics right now, so it is unavailable for order. We will email you shortly once the system has relaunched."
I drove traffic through a handful of cold emails and Adwords. Out of something like 200 visitors, eight people submitted their email addresses to my test form. This meant that 1 in 25 people were interested in a product I hadn't even built yet. Needless to say, I felt pretty good about moving forward with the idea.

I don't agree with 'screw MVPs and landing pages' but I do certainly agree with 'your goal is first sale'. These things are definitely not incompatible opposites.

Your friends and colleagues will all tell you something is a good idea until you ask them for money.

I'm in the process of launching a site-building service and in order to be able to display a bunch of existing clients on the landing page, I've built a handful of sites for friends free of charge. It's important to note that none of these folks have validated the idea yet.

The first person to validate the idea will be the first person to hit that Buy Now button and actually give me money.

Totally agree.

Don't get me wrong. I'm very much for the concept of a minimum viable product, but what often gets lost in the startup/bootstrap/whatever community is the definition of viable.

For me, viable means "good enough that someone would be willing to buy it." Don't worry about getting all of the features in, but you need to have a completed product.

I agree. One is food on the table, the other is wasting CPU cycles :3

I agree with your sentiment basically.

When things get too easy, quality suffers and it feels like a bubble is about to pop - just like subprime loans. Except the money is not flowing.

Probably Kickstarter for SaaS might do it if such a thing existed - take pre-orders for the concept and fund when the goal is met. It's the MVP with pre-order built-in.

It's worth thinking why Kickstarter rarely works for software projects. There are some successful ones, but they are pretty rare.

Agree with the main points. However, don't toss out the MVP's or landing pages... you are going to need those to get that first sale :).

I think the discussion needs to be about what happens after you have the MVP/Landing page. Do you immediately post it on IH/Reddit/etc., for feedback and then sit back? Or do you try get that 1st sale?

Completly agree that direct sales is vastly underrated as a way to generate feedback and validate product market fit. The reason I love direct sales from day 1 is that it allows you to test different messaging/positioning/pricing per discussion.

This seems like pretty solid advice to me, but how does it apply to business models that aren't going to be direct sales? Say you were planning a freemium product where the majority of users would join and add value to the site but a smaller percentage would pay for premium features what would you do then? What about a site that intends to live off ad revenue or affiliate links?