It seems like HN echo chamber response to me. People are never going to tell you a potential solution works or doesn't. HNers will give you high level, and if the app is done will often go through it and nit-pick, but they are NOT anywhere close to paying customers for a vast majority of people (as valuable as their advice is).
As for the regular users (the ones who would be your clients' potential customers on the site), quite frankly they don't have the ability to extrapolate from a picture or even an alpha version if the product will serve their needs.
This seems a lot like feedback army at best.
What I would like to see instead:
Feedback army has the informal aspect of this market tackled pretty well. I'd like to see something a little closer to focus groups. My major issue with feedback army was that of the 25 reviews I got I think all but 2 were "yes this is good, yes I would use it, yes this was easy to use" - they have no stake in the project and often times seemed to be trying to tell me what I wanted to hear. Of the 95% or so who would "definitely" use the site, not a single one continued (no shock, but makes me question the validity of their responses).
What I would like to see is a way to pick 15-30 people as "evangelist testers" or something, people who you would perhaps pay, or would be offered some other kind of incentive to really think about the problem they are trying to solve and how your app fits into it. This would give those 15-30 people a real way to be involved in the app's creation process, and the app creator much more high quality feedback. But the focus has to be on quality not quantity IMO. I would be willing to pay a monthly fee for that.
As for the regular users (the ones who would be your clients' potential customers on the site), quite frankly they don't have the ability to extrapolate from a picture or even an alpha version if the product will serve their needs.
This seems a lot like feedback army at best.
What I would like to see instead: Feedback army has the informal aspect of this market tackled pretty well. I'd like to see something a little closer to focus groups. My major issue with feedback army was that of the 25 reviews I got I think all but 2 were "yes this is good, yes I would use it, yes this was easy to use" - they have no stake in the project and often times seemed to be trying to tell me what I wanted to hear. Of the 95% or so who would "definitely" use the site, not a single one continued (no shock, but makes me question the validity of their responses).
What I would like to see is a way to pick 15-30 people as "evangelist testers" or something, people who you would perhaps pay, or would be offered some other kind of incentive to really think about the problem they are trying to solve and how your app fits into it. This would give those 15-30 people a real way to be involved in the app's creation process, and the app creator much more high quality feedback. But the focus has to be on quality not quantity IMO. I would be willing to pay a monthly fee for that.