A sale is worth more than a thousand upvotes

If an investor tells you to post your product on a link aggregator to show that people love it and your customers aren’t specifically the people who read link aggregators, walk away from that investor.

Being loved in a place like that means basically nothing and the readers are lovely and I’ve been one for over a decade and collectively we’re the magpies of the internet. We love seeing the new shiny thing. That reaction tells you the thing is shiny. It doesn’t tell you anybody will pay for it and those are completely different pieces of information that feel identical when they arrive.

The base rate makes the case on its own. For every product that got posted somewhere like that and went on to become enormous, there are hundreds of launches that received a pile of really warm commentary and then went nowhere at all. The comments weren’t dishonest. People meant them. Meaning it and buying it are separated by a gap that no amount of enthusiasm closes.

There’s a particular flavour of comment that’s worth learning to discount and it’s the most encouraging one you’ll get. Somebody says the thing looks great and they’d buy it, at a price they’ve invented which is invariably far below what you’d need to charge. That’s not a customer. That’s a person being nice about a demo and treating it as a signal will send you into a pricing conversation with yourself that has no basis in anything.

If you want to show an investor there’s something here, post about it where your actual customers are and take feedback from people who might one day hand you money. That’s harder and slower and a lot less pleasant because those people are not there to be encouraging and will tell you what’s wrong with it in flat, unenthusiastic terms.

If you really want to prove it, sell to them and get one sale off a prototype or a proof of concept or whatever rough thing you’ve currently got. A single person choosing to part with money for something visibly unfinished tells you more than a million people saying it looks good because paying is the only response that costs the person anything.

That’s the whole test and it’s why it works. Praise is free so people give it away. Money isn’t so it only moves when somebody has actually decided.

None of this means those places are useless, and plenty of good things have started there. What they’re good for is finding people like you to build with, getting a technical decision stress-tested by somebody who has made the same mistake already, and occasionally reaching a customer when your customers genuinely are developers. Those are real and they’re not validation.

The confusion is understandable because the feedback arrives in the same shape as the thing you want, and enthusiastic, specific, from people who clearly understood what you built. It’s just measuring interest rather than intent, and only one of those two turns into a business.

The cheapest way to find out which you’ve got is to ask for something small that costs the person something. A pre-order, a deposit, a scheduled call with somebody who’d have to sign off the purchase. Enthusiasm survives all of those questions or it doesn’t, and finding out in week three is a great deal less expensive than finding out in month nine after you built the whole thing on a comment thread.