I have a bad habit.
My bad habit is working a lot of hours on a side project with my head down just coding away, not coming up for air and NOT ASKING FOR ANYONE'S FEEDBACK ALONG THE WAY! So, my question is, when do you guys ask for feedback? I feel silly asking for feedback without something to put in front of someone, and then I feel silly again putting something in front of someone that's not polished enough to not give me the heebie geebies (sp?). So, I'm curious, IH - how early and often are you all looking for feedback on your ideas?
You should almost never ask for feedback.
Before you ship something, ask your target audience to describe their problem.
If it still makes sense, make a landing page and ask people to sign up and take action.
If people pull through, involve them in your planning (they'll give feedback by themselves).
Once you have a MVP, charge money.
It's too easy for feedback to become an eco chamber.
As a former scientist, I love the idea of low investment experimentation and metric tracking. I honestly think I'll give this a shot. I'm always kicking around 5 or 6 ideas at a time in my head, never sure which one to devote time to. I think propping a few up on a few easy landing pages is a great idea. I mean, I just submitted my email to a landing page the other day! People still do that, right? =)
I highly recommend reading The Mom Test if you're trying to figure out how and when to talk to customers early on. It's a super short book, and even just the first 5 pages will teach you quite a lot.
As @dqmonn pointed out, it's easy for customer conversations to be misleading, but it's up to you to learn how to avoid being misled while also continuing to talk to people.
And I believe in talking to people very, very often. Learn about their problems and personas, show them your product and watch them use it, try to sell them, etc. Dogfooding your own product can help relieve this burden a tiny bit, but there's no substitute for the real thing.
I love the sound of The Mom Test - I'll burn an audible credit on it. Is it good for audio? Or, should I absolutely pick up a hard copy?
I like the hard copy for this one, because it's kind of a manual that you can refer to repeatedly until you internalize things. Hard to refer back to audio books. That said, even just listening on audio will help you out.
I have the same habit, I won't call it bad tho. I have read the lean startup, the mom test and all that fancy things. I don't buy the MVP thing. I'm an engineer and love to build and I won't ship a product that's not complete. My only change in strategy is to be able to ship within 4 months. I also don't care about validation. If I will use it, I'll build it. I don't need 10 or 100 people to tell me that they will use it. I don't also care about a massive market size or operating at scale. If I can get 5,000 customers I'm good. I don't care about competition anymore for any product. There's always room for more. The only thing that bothers me and I'm yet to figure out is how to build a distribution channel. I'm only going to be seeking feedback after launch and only from those that pay.