Yes you can, you can put up a page that describes the thing, and pretend it exists, and try to get someone to click the "let me put my credit card # in already!" button.
One click, a single click will not destroy you brand. And OP would've realized that no matter even with their best shot they couldn't get 10 clicks.
10 disappointed non-customers won't destroy your brand.
Okay i have a page and i HAVE to get people here with paid traffic like adwords because no one will write about my non-existent app.
So now I get a bit of traffic but nobody clicks the buy button...
Is it because i drew the wrong crowd? Is it because they don't know me? is it because adwords conversions are usually very low so do i need to pay for more traffic?
If it actually is because my product sucks, then cool.. But what do i change?
There is no way to know this; which is why i believe the buy button is not the way to go.... at the beginning.
You can still do this before you start building, but it must be done after talking to at least a few customers.
The traditional customer interviews are always the best way to start.
Firstly you can learn how other people describe the type of product you are offering - not necessarily how you describe it. With Adwords you'll see the types of keywords that people are typing to have your adverts displayed, some of these keyword phrases may include words you haven't considered. You then add these new words to your list and see the results. Rinse and repeat.
Now people are coming to your site you can track what they do. What price point has the most clicks, what wording bounces the least, etc.
I have done exactly what erikpukinskis described and it serves to not only validate (or not) your idea, but the great thing about this is I learned far more what real people are actually wanting, not what I thought they wanted.
A couple of weeks investing in a quick wordpress site and some adwords to validate and modify an idea before building is so much better then building it then seeing if they will come.
> Is it because i drew the wrong crowd? Is it because they don't know me? is it because adwords conversions are usually very low so do i need to pay for more traffic?
You don't just put up one ad using some keywords and be done with it. You constantly tweak, seeing what keywords people are using to find your ads, which keywords have the highest click through rate.
When I did this for a little idea I was thinking of doing, this was incredibly helpfu
The product I was think about doing was related to niche websites. I thought most people would use the word "niche" to describe them, it quickly became apparent that the real word people used was "affiliate" I saw "affiliate" appear a lot with related keywords and in the stats on the site, so I added an adword targeting that and related keywords, CTR doubled.
Using adwords helps you define and recognise the crowd you draw so you can best cater to them.
> If it actually is because my product sucks, then cool.. But what do i change?
Again, don't keep it static. In my experiment above, the first 100 clicks saw no interest. I changed some wording, a tiny improvement (less bounces etc). I changed the price, less bounces. I added FAQs, less bounces, I tweaked the available functions - possibly people would want feature X. Bang! people clicking on the "order now" button. Feature X is what people want
> There is no way to know this; which is why i believe the buy button is not the way to go.... at the beginning.
But talking to customers is exactly what these guys did:
> So we talked to a few artists who said they thought it was a cool idea. BOOM! Our idea had been validated!
The idea had not been validated at all, just been told it was "cool". What they should have done next (or possibly at the same time) is spend a couple of hundred dollars on adwords to see if a cool idea converted into something people would actually want to buy.
What they should not have done is
> stopped talking to artists for a year and built (and rebuilt) the software until we thought it was acceptable
My point is that I would far rather spend $200-$500 on adwords and not on 1 year development of a product that is thought to be cool, but no one has actually had the opportunity to come to it fresh and click on an "order now" button.
This post is a bit on the extreme side of not talking to your customers. Of B2B that fail, I'd be surprised if most burn out this badly. Most get someone to use them.. just not enough.
As for the advice of getting clicks, strongly product dependent.
Imagine you are a PaaS, say Heroku. It'd be a bit hard to adequately market such a product without convincing docs and people actually playing around with it. That is.. building the product.
And even if you could get some CC conversions, it still wouldn't validate the product because so much of the stick/not stick with it will come down to user experience. Which for a pretty technical product is a bit of an unknown.
The problem is that the majority of first time founders are:
(1) overly protective about their non-existent brand
(2) afraid that they will not get any clicks
(3) so attached to the idea that even if no one clicks, the design is to blame not the idea
This leads into spending far too much time not iterating on a broken realization of an idea, insisting that "with time it'll work out" or "just a little further, we're gaining momentum", when evidence shows that the company is actually at its worst :P
One click, a single click will not destroy you brand. And OP would've realized that no matter even with their best shot they couldn't get 10 clicks.
10 disappointed non-customers won't destroy your brand.