For every Facebook you quote me, I'll show you 10,000 others that didn't succeed and instead wasted time and effort when they could have done some customer research exactly like this.
Why would you invest that much? If your minimum viable product takes months and thousands of dollars you're doing it wrong.
Secondly I'd be pretty pissed if I put my idea up on a service like this, demand for it skyrockets, then someone steals it and develops it before me.
(engineer * number of engineers) - (average monthly payment * number of customers) < 0
An engineer's salary at a small startup is at the very least $50,000, let's just round that down to $5,000 a month, so how long do you think it would take you to reach $15,000 a month in recurring revenue at what are probably $5 a month plans (this does not include any other costs such as office, servers etc). That's about 3,000 users. And that's just to pay a very poor salary with no other kind of expenses.
"Sure, that looks great! I'd buy one"
So you go off and make it only to be greeted by tumble weed when it comes time to sell. Cure: retrospective questioning.
What steps have you taken to solve this problem? How much have you spent?
They're not going to unintentionally mislead you with those questions.
1. Read "The Lean Startup."
2. Find the cheapest and fastest way to test whether potential customers think you should build it for them. For example, you could make a fake product web page with a "try free" button and count the number of people who click the button.
Asking us is not lean. Asking customers is not lean. Testing customers != asking them. Building it is too expensive a test to be lean.
Gotta run, can't put more words into this, sorry!
Nearly all big inventions are the opposite of lean - some people went and built something that nobody had thought of using before and those inventions took off. If you had just put up a survey asking people if they want a 'noisy, horseless carriage' you would have gotten a resounding no.
A lack of clicks on a random signup page with just a blurb doesn't imply the product will fail in the market. It could imply that users don't understand the value or a number of other things.
However, a MVP failing pretty much does imply failure, so I'd personally say throw out 'lean' and stick with MVP for anything 'pushing boundaries'.
But, chances are this will not be able to make money as it (1) requires user setup (2) will be fairly difficult to build - api integration is not that easy (3) most users simply don't care about what happens to their data until it is gone.
(3, my experience) goes directly against your Thesis #2. (1) goes against your Thesis #3 - users generally are not forward thinking enough to do something now that will only benefit them later. I'd say start on actually trying to test your Thesis #1-#3 before assuming them correct.
That said, I think an MVP is the way to go on something like this (NOT something fake with a fake button; that's for scammy money-grubbers). There is probably a niche for something like this; the only question is if they will pay for it or not, and pay enough to keep the service alive. I know of photographers that would love a one-click upload to all the photo sites. Same with videos, tweets, and blog posts. Seeing if they will pay will simply require you to try it.
Doesn't seem like much of a backup to me... I'd hope at the very least that even if there isn't a local storage option they would build it to support other peoples "cloud storage" products.
2. Cross posting to multiple services is really, really hard. Each service has a different number of fields. You would have to get the user to complete the full information for each service in one go. Technically you could map all these fields, but from a UX point of view it's really hard.
3. Most services cross post between other services already. At least in a way that matters to most. And there are various ways that are "good enough"
Having said that, yes there is a demand for this. I've heard it direct from my customers. I actually work the other way in that I aggregate what you already post socially.
But I would look very hard at the financial side on this, I'm not sure you'll make enough money to warrant the effort.
That said, the response will be from so many different people with different ideas of their ideal solution to this that it shouldn't used to determine the worth. People will try something if it exists, and they'd rather waste their time trying to use it than answering questions about what it is.
`width: x%` is always going to lead to poor image-scaling, but it can be mitigated somewhat.
Good to see you man! Heard your pitch at Startup Weekend Delhi
I don't see consumers ever paying for this, however.
Getting people to pay for stuff is not the same as asking them if they would.
People don't buy Ideas, they buy Value.
