[billpatrianakos]

So the author is right and I really enjoyed reading this as I've got myself one of those shiny ideas and I can relate but then when he gets to the part about prototyping I get angry.

The implication in that part of the story is that if the author can get a million users with a 20minute - 12hour prototype then you should be able to as well. I think that's bullshit and it'll discourage a lot of people. If he had said "a quick prototype... And fair amount of users, enough to show you there's interest..." then it would have been perfect! Not everyone has a 12 hour block to create a prototype even if it's a simple CRUD app and some people aren't master programmers that can whip up a prototype worthy of a million users in 20 minutes but they may still be very capable of knocking something out that's of good quality to them and fast measured on their own scale. Now a lot of people reading this think the bar is set at a million users for a prototype to be worthy of further work. Even I thought that and I know better!

For example, a few months back I knocked out a quick prototype, stripped down to the core, just like the article describes. It took me a week or two to get it up though because I just didn't have time to do it all at once. That prototype with absolutely zero promotion got 40 users in 3 weeks. There was only a single link pointing to it from another orphan site that also gets no promotion from me. After reading this article I thought I was a failure. I didn't make my prototype in 20 minutes and it has nowhere near a million users. But then I remembered I'm operating on a different scale. I'm a nobody with no personal brand and no widely read blog. So my 40 users are the same as his million on my scale.

So in the end I think those details were misleading and unnecessary. I think they're unrealistic too. Either the bar is set super high for anyone with an idea or that was bragging. I mean, that's really impressive and deserves to be bragged about but when it's in a blog post meant to motivate, advise, or inspire people it only serves to set up the naive for a let down and get realists upset.