If You Don’t Think You Need It, You Haven’t Seen Greatness

Re:If You Don’t Think You Need It, You Haven’t Seen Greatness by DanI-S on Tuesday July 24, 2012 @08:21PM (#4288786)

> the exercise of ‘writing the ideal press release’ first, before you even write a line of code

That's an interesting idea - Press Driven Development. Has anyone here tried it?

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Re:If You Don’t Think You Need It, You Haven’t Seen Greatness by amirmc on Tuesday July 24, 2012 @08:24PM (#4288795)

This is also Amazon's approach to product development. See the Quora answer at: http://www.quora.com/What-is-Amazons-approach-to-product-dev...

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Re:If You Don’t Think You Need It, You Haven’t Seen Greatness by wilfra on Wednesday July 25, 2012 @12:01AM (#4289304)

Wow that answer is a great read. Thanks!

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Re:If You Don’t Think You Need It, You Haven’t Seen Greatness by Heinleinian on Tuesday July 24, 2012 @10:15PM (#4289060)

The original, $10 million X Prize (for the first private space flights) was launched this way. They did a huge press conference to launch the prize competition, and got the head of NASA and a bunch of astronauts there.

Peter Diamandis later said he didn't have a dime of the prize money at the time -- he quietly raised it later. In the meantime, everyone just assumed he had it because the launch event had so much credibility attached to it.

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Re:If You Don’t Think You Need It, You Haven’t Seen Greatness by kanzure on Tuesday July 24, 2012 @11:15PM (#4289183)

I thought the prize money was insurance money?

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Re:If You Don’t Think You Need It, You Haven’t Seen Greatness by Heinleinian on Tuesday July 24, 2012 @11:43PM (#4289263)

Partially. The insurance policy still cost a couple million dollars, which they had to raise. And they didn't purchase the insurance policy until several years after the competition was launched.

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Re:If You Don’t Think You Need It, You Haven’t Seen Greatness by gvb on Tuesday July 24, 2012 @10:28PM (#4289087)

Quite a few, actually. There was (is?) a rash of people who create a simple teaser web site that collects contact information from interested parties as their "MVP" to "validate" their idea. No code. No product.

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Re:If You Don’t Think You Need It, You Haven’t Seen Greatness by regularfry on Wednesday July 25, 2012 @03:33AM (#4289820)

I know it predates him, but Tim Ferriss recommended something like this in the Four Hour Work Week, which everyone seems to have read.

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Re:If You Don’t Think You Need It, You Haven’t Seen Greatness by andy_boot on Wednesday July 25, 2012 @10:06AM (#4290981)

I've been experimenting with it recently.

It doesn't take long to throw up a landing page, mailchimp and $50 of targeted facebook [or adword] ads.

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Re:If You Don’t Think You Need It, You Haven’t Seen Greatness by saraid216 on Tuesday July 24, 2012 @08:49PM (#4288865)

It sounds to me like any other kind of specification writing, simply from a marketing perspective. I can see the benefits, but eh. I'm not really convinced.

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Re:If You Don’t Think You Need It, You Haven’t Seen Greatness by mayukh on Tuesday July 24, 2012 @09:25PM (#4288963)

The benefits are to bring a clarity and focus to the product development process not always enforced by a spec. Who are you building this for as opposed to what are the features.

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Re:If You Don’t Think You Need It, You Haven’t Seen Greatness by knewter on Tuesday July 24, 2012 @11:15PM (#4289184)

Writing specifications, and knowing which items in the roadmap bring the most value to the greatest numbers, are hugely different beasts. I definitely took the PR-driven approach to mean identifying those 2 items, even if taken by themselves (without the rest of the roadmap) they are meaningless. This is a massive, valuable skill to have...and one I'm not sure how to acquire. Don't know if this convinces you, but the article really spoke to me.

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