Ship it. Give it away. Take it away. Ask.

For ch. 18, Ship it, and see if they miss it · proposal the-miss-it-test in the plan

Four boxes in a row: ship, give it away, take it away, ask: do they miss it? Two branches. If they shrug and go back to their day, you do not have a product yet. If they come back and ask for it, you have something, and two questions follow: is the price one they are happy to pay, and is that price profitable for you? A note above: before you ask whether a stranger misses it, ask whether you would.

What it is for

Readers valued this test most; drawn as a decision tree, a founder can run it on the wall and know what each answer means.

How it is made

Drawn by admin/build/infographic_svg.py from admin/content/infographics/drawn/the-miss-it-test.json, as a graph. Change the data and rebuild; the picture follows. It keeps the book's colours in every theme of this site, because it is a printed picture: the same file goes into the PDF.

Checked against the source

Every line below is on the drawing or behind it, and the build found each one word for word in v2/content/6-start-the-company/18__ship-it-and-see-if-they-miss-it.md. A line changed in the chapter and not here stops the release.

“Ship it. Give it away. Take it away. Ask.” ✓
“Then do whatever the answer tells you, including the thing you did not want to hear.” ✓
“If they shrug and go back to their day, you do not have a product yet.” ✓
“If they come back and ask for it, you have something.” ✓
“Is the price one they are happy to pay? And is that price profitable for you?” ✓
“a thing somebody else can go and use, on their own, and get value from” ✓
“you would not pick up your own tool on Monday morning” ✓
“No sense of loss means no why now” ✓