Suppose I came up with an idea that I absolutely knew was brilliant, let's say edible shoelaces. Unfortunately these edible shoelaces aren't cheap to produce. I'm a one man shop and have almost no money.
I make a fully functional website to sell this product, only I don't have the product yet. When people browse the site and have gone through the pricing page, etc... and finally click "buy" I simply tell them that we're out of stock.
Now I want to see if people are actually trying to buy this thing, so I start marketing but have a limited budget. I throw $1000 at ad words. If I get 100 people trying to buy my edible shoelaces at $20 each then I know that maybe it's worth investing in manufacturing the product.
How is this not useful data? Instead of going all out and spending money on manufacturing and a website, you only pay for the website and hold off on the manufacturing expense until you're confident it'll pay off.
Except that we are talking document management here, not edible shoelaces. Or anything that requires "manufacturing" in the made-in-a-factory sense of the word.
A fake ad survey for a document management system from someone who "works in the electronic Document Management and Records Management industry" is shouting out loud, "I'm too scared to actually sit and code this thing because it's hard and I might take too long to do it or completely fail to do it."
And I don't know why people like throwing money away. With $100, I'd rather buy 5 months of Linode server time than 12 email addresses. When the best entrepreneurs are saying be cheap, I think we ought to listen and be cheap. And with 2 weeks of time, I'd rather sit and code the most basic functionality of my app and show it to people I know who might need it.
I make a fully functional website to sell this product, only I don't have the product yet. When people browse the site and have gone through the pricing page, etc... and finally click "buy" I simply tell them that we're out of stock.
Now I want to see if people are actually trying to buy this thing, so I start marketing but have a limited budget. I throw $1000 at ad words. If I get 100 people trying to buy my edible shoelaces at $20 each then I know that maybe it's worth investing in manufacturing the product.
How is this not useful data? Instead of going all out and spending money on manufacturing and a website, you only pay for the website and hold off on the manufacturing expense until you're confident it'll pay off.