“Did you try it before judging it?”
I typed that to a stranger on Reddit seven months ago. Then I typed some version of it again. And again. “Check it out before judging.” “Try it first and then let me know what you think.”
I had just shipped a side project I found interesting. Then I went looking for feedback, because that is what you are supposed to do. If you are about to launch something new (a service, a price change, a new website, a second location), this is about who you ask first, and why most of the answers you get will come from the wrong people.
The idea started in one of Dominik Gmeiner’s Builder’s Gym sessions. We got talking about personal libraries, and he showed us the tabs he sticks along the top and side of a book to flag what matters. I laughed and said I always know exactly where I stopped reading any book on my shelf. That’s where the bookmark is.
The app is called Distillio. You photograph your bookshelf, pick three books, and it gives you 27 things to do with them: nine key points, nine to-dos, and nine thinking prompts, plus an honest paragraph about what your whole shelf is saying about you. I built it in about a week, for people like me, who buy the books with real intention and then end up stopping a third of the way through.
I started in a no-code forum on Reddit. Then I posted in a community for solopreneurs. Then one for side projects.
The side project post was seen 455 times. It got one comment: “Why would I need insights, key points, and whatever the third thing was about books I already own?”
He never opened the app.
The solopreneur thread was busier. A long string of comments. Some kind, some sharp. One person said the real problem is attention and discipline, not insight. Another said the output is “exactly what you would get if you typed those titles into Claude.” A third read the landing page and stopped there, because he reads on a Kindle.
Almost none of them had tried it.
So I kept answering every hard comment the same way. Try it first. Did you try it before judging it? I was frustrated, and it showed. I was asking for feedback and then arguing with it.
Here is the part I missed while I was busy defending my app. Three people in that thread said some version of the same thing: I built something similar. I just had this idea last night. I thought of a similar app a couple of years ago.
They were not my users. They were my competition.
If you run a business, you have been in that room too. Float a new offer past your peers, and the people nodding the loudest are often the ones selling something like it.
That is when it clicked. The marketing says anyone can build their future in a weekend now, and it is true. Building got cheap. So everyone is building. And the places you go to ask for feedback have filled up with other builders, giving your idea thirty seconds on their way back to their own.
I call this the Builder’s Echo. When the people answering you are building, not buying, their feedback sounds like demand. It is mostly your own idea bouncing back off people making the same thing.
Feedback from someone who never used your product is a review of your pitch, not your product.
Both have value. Nobody tells you which one you are getting.
Then I found a site called Vibe Coding List. It works differently. You list what you want feedback on. Reviewers are expected to use the product and write real, specific sentences about it. When you rank their feedback as helpful, they get rewarded for it.
The first review found three bugs in one pass. The privacy policy text overlapped until you could not read it. The Google sign-up button was greyed out. And a shelf photo with books plainly visible came back with “We couldn’t find any books here.”
Any one of those would have sent a real customer away without a word. I would never have known why.
The second reviewer did not like the idea at all. He said reading is his own reflection, and he did not want AI deciding what matters. Then he asked a question I could not answer well: how does a user delete all of their information? He was never going to be my customer. He was still one of my most useful reviewers, because he dug into the product, the fine print included, before he told me what he thought of it.
The third review, months later, found a layout bug in the downloadable report, measured it, and suggested the fix. That review was written with the help of an AI agent. The most precise feedback I have received on my own app came from a machine that was told to use it first.
Then I checked my own backyard. My most-commented LinkedIn post last week was about how I build software with AI. The top industry in its audience was software development. The top job title was software engineer. I write for owner-operators, and people at companies of two to ten employees, the closest thing to my reader, made up about one in six viewers.
Same echo. Different room.
Now the uncomfortable part. You may remember from an earlier issue that the first version of my opportunity scoring system had its answers baked in. I had just rebuilt it so it actually worked. Then I built Distillio in a week and never ran it through.
And when I went back to it after those threads, I found the hole. My system asked whether an idea was worth wanting. It barely asked whether the idea could reach a paying customer, and by what route. So I added that second question. An idea that scores well on the first and poorly on the second is not a no. It is a warning: prove the path before you build.
The cleanest example of proving the path I have seen came from a builder named Nico Jeannen, profiled in the newsletter AI & No-Code Exits. In December 2022 he had an idea for an app that makes logos with AI. He had only learned to code months earlier. So he did not build the app.
He built a landing page with a payment form. When orders came in, he made the logos himself and emailed them out. The newsletter put it in one line: he “validated demand with orders, not opinions.” Only then did he build the app. Three months after launch, he sold it for $65,000.
He did not wait for anyone’s opinion. He asked strangers to pay, and the ones who did told him what he needed to know.
The strongest feedback is a payment.
You are probably not building an app. But I would wager the Builder’s Echo is already in your business.
You float a new service at your chamber lunch or your mastermind. Everyone nods. Some of them sell something similar.
You ask your web vendor whether the new site is working. Of course they say yes. They built it.
You ask your team whether the new process is better. They are the ones who designed it.
None of those people are lying to you. They are just not the ones who will pay for it, use it, or leave quietly when it does not work.
Here is what I would do this week.
Recruit five people who would actually pay for the thing, so you hear what a customer would tell you before they become an ex-customer. Not friends. Not peers. Not vendors. Look for people who fit your ideal customer profile, your ICP in marketing speak, and who don’t owe you anything.
Give each of them a specific job. Not “what do you think?” Ask them to book the appointment, read the proposal, go through the checkout, find the price. Then ask where they got stuck, so you find the exact spot where a real customer would quietly give up.
Make it worth their time, so you get their honest attention instead of a polite nod. A gift card, a free month, a discount on the real thing. When I moved to a place that rewarded reviewers for honest, specific answers, the quality of feedback changed overnight.
Before you trust any piece of feedback, ask one question, so you know what to act on and what to file: did this person use it, and would they pay for it? Better yet, did they already? If the answer is no, file it under pitch feedback. It can still help your message. It cannot tell you whether the thing works.
If you build software, a site like Vibe Coding List will find those reviewers for you. Most of you don’t, so here is what I do now instead. Before I build anything, I run it through my opportunity scoring system, and it asks two questions: is this worth wanting, and is there a real path to someone who will pay? From now on, if I can’t answer the second one, I find the five people before I build.
And stop doing two things. Stop posting your idea to a room full of peers and calling the replies demand. And stop answering criticism with “try it first.” I did that about a dozen times. It never got one person to try it. If people will not take the first step, that is feedback too, and it is about your front door, not about them.
Everyone has an opinion about what you are building. Go find the few who will actually use it.
Richard D. Stuart
The Weekly Prescription