Another example of free advice being worth what you pay for it. As someone that buys things, I don't recommend this advice. (Maybe if the person that posted it had some evidence beyond a short story it would be different.)
"I wasted a lot of money, and have got burnt by a business partner that simply couldn't sell what we made despite making all the right noises."
Just throwing this out - maybe the inability to sell is correlated with the first part of your post.
You don't have to do this of course if your price point is $10,000+, you could go get agreement in principles if it's a bigger product.
But for smaller products that are online only signup? Getting all dewey eyed over someone not getting their $10 p/m new to-do app, and go spend months building it instead and then finding there's no market?
You're making the wrong call there. Test the market, prove you can sell it, then make it. A couple of people not getting their $10 p/m app vs you losing $10,000s on wasted time is worth that.
To be honest, as a professor what have you ever had to do business-wise? You've never left academia apparantly. It must be nice to critize but I have no respect for your advice.
To be frank, we're doing quite well so far.
edit: which is why it's critical to be honest with your customers at all times.
My question is: Does it really need to be this way? Certainly humans will try to "game" the system like you're describing, but is it possible to design an economy, through regulations or otherwise, where this strategy of lying to customers won't succeed? Is business this way because we allow it to be, because the people in charge of business decisions want to maintain their ill-gained power?
An important problem in human societies, which become complex enough to examine 'memes' as elements of culture (in the original, Dawkins sense, not just the 'familiar pictures with text' sense), is that people learn 'signals' without verifying their accuracy.
Making business more honest is about getting society to use more accurate signals, which comes from, basically, work, but also awareness of the necessity of doing that work.
Defining where, exactly, the boundary between honest and dishonest is can be difficult. Is it dishonest to sell a pair of shoes that costs $2 to make for $200?
The way that more accurate signalling can fix this is that people would not assume that the $200 pair of shoes is better. Or they would not assume that someone who owns the $200 pair of shoes has some beneficial quality that they would currently associate with it.
Will not get into how to improve signal accuracy, as there's no chance my explanation would lead to the solution being used.
But what happens if only one person signs up?
You've proved it doesn't work, and yet you have to deliver your app to this one person, right?
It's the difference between spending $10,000s making something to find out you're incapable of selling anything, or not.
I've made this mistake, twice too, getting too wrapped up in the dev.
It's stupid to do it that way round. I wasted a lot of money, and have got burnt by a business partner that simply couldn't sell what we made despite making all the right noises.