HACKER Q&A
📣 zhongyongxu

Would you pay for video prototype validation before building?


I'm a developer who's wasted months building features nobody wanted.

Now I'm exploring a service: create 3-minute video prototypes to validate demand before writing code, then run targeted surveys.

The pitch: $500-1000 and 3-5 days to avoid a $20k failed MVP.

I don't have a product yet—just talked to 2 devs who said they'd use it.

Questions: 1. How do you validate features today? 2. Would you trust "fake" video prototype data? 3. What would make you actually pay for this?

Looking for brutal honesty before I build anything.

  👤 vunderba Accepted Answer ✓
Trust is your biggest hurdle. For me, you'd have to answer several questions before I'd be comfortable plunking down 1000 USD.

1. Who are you?

2. Are you an established expert in any of the overlapping fields? (video, product demos, outreach, sales, SEO, etc)

3. How do I know you're not just throwing together an animated figma and using bots to simulate survey answers?