[anonauthor]

I'm the author of the piece. I can appreciate that it's difficult to walk away with any point of action without knowing the who and how, but I'd prefer to stay anonymous.

My intention in sharing the story was simply to say that even if you're broke, non-technical, over 30, etc., you can still make it happen. It was meant to be more motivational than informative.

I'm not looking for the recognition, only to hopefully help others in the same boat.

Really appreciate the interest and discussion.

[Theodores]

It is an interesting way to go, most people on here would have the code "fully unit tested" with at least the latest in Twitter Bootstrap 3 for the frontend and good ideas on how to scale the thing before showing the product to potential customers/users.

A solid product kind of helps with the success of things and there is always the ever-present risk that a software project will take aeons longer than intended. A software product should be understandable to the target audience within seconds of seeing it. Not having at least a prototype to show (as above, without it being optimised for scaling up) is not really going to make that easy - there is a lot to explain that could be simple to just 'get' with the prototype up and running. So, from the programmer perspective you took a lot of risk!

[digikata]

Can you share a little more detail re: the signup/how it works pages? Did they just describe the product and say signup if you're interested? Did you let on that there was no product yet, or that it was "in development", or no status at all? What does one do with 20k interested customers between lining up investment and actually delivering product?

[anonauthor]

What I didn't mention in the post is that we didn't have a backend programmer until we had 20k people signed up, so no code was a byproduct of our situation, not a matter of pride.

Because we had so much hype before our product we had a miserable launch. We tried to delay it as long as we could, but feared losing interest if we waited too long.

In terms of signup/how it works, we gave people a storyline that we felt would attract interest (which it did), we also used exclusivity. We gave a intended launch date, which eventually bit us in the ass (will never do that again).