Though this is reasonable, I wonder if it's measuring the right thing. Since money isn't involved (as far as I know), people could be entering their email just out of curiosity. It's easy to provide an email for a notification of completion, after which, make a decision to continue with participation or move on entirely.
So that's what it's been called. Lately I've been having people trying to schedule interviews with me about their service.
It's so incredibly annoying, because it wastes my time, and I get to learn that they are considering charging way way way more than I'd ever want to spent, so I stop using them regardless.
It's like a lose/lose scenario. I get the impression their pitching out different money numbers to try and see response, but when you say something clearly off the wall, I just stop using your service.
I don't want there to be some possibility a month or two down the road that you're going to try and up the price to one of those insane ones you asked me about.
So far for me, "Customer Development" is the single largest turnoff for any application.
Testing pricing isn't usually a big part of interviews unless you are addressing an enterprise market. Also, Customer Development is larger in scope than pricing or interviews:
Thanks for the link to the article. I think that certain people have the time, or are willing to do this for a startup. There's nothing wrong with that.
But I think it's important to not think of it like a sales pitch.
I am getting "Customer Development" calls as if they are a sales pitch. As if it's okay to sort of bully me into trying to respond to the questions, like a sales person refuses to accept no.
This is incredible annoying, and it's good to see where the (good) intentions of this thing come from.
i think the purpose of these types of "launch pages" is to gauge interest... to see if there's really enough interest to spend the time and effort creating the working system. it's also a great way to create a list of potential beta users. when something is ready, the person running the site can hand out beta codes to people that have signed up, and get real feedback at that point
