Why should the consumer have to constantly suffer through a parade of fake ads for fake startups that don’t really know what consumers want and just want to try a bunch of things and see what shit sticks?
I used to buy stuff from Instagram ads, but now it’s littered with companies putting up ads for a bunch of random Chinese crap they can find on Ali Express and seeing what gets the most orders so they can ship it off to customers and then it turns out to be some piece of shit. Because of that I no longer pay attention to products advertised like that. This is the startup equivalent.
Personally, you may know a friend or family member who wasted a lot of time on a bad idea or possibly hurt themselves financially. Many people, like me, do. It hurts to see. So consumers benefit if their loved ones who are entrepreneurs can avoid making some bad business decisions by getting information earlier.
The world is quickly becoming polluted with these validation-ware startups that are cowardly looking for ways to push risk onto the consumer, and the consumer is starting to wise up. Pretty soon, any new ideas are going to be met with skepticism and cynicism, even if there is a real product already made. Everyone wants money upfront, no one wants to just build shit and hope for the best anymore. Sometimes they even take your money and deliver nothing; how many people have been burned by kickstarters?
The end result of lean startup methods being practiced at massive scales is that it becomes harder for any startup to be taken seriously and it becomes harder for entrepreneurs to get real validation.