The author makes good points but to me the launch is less about product validation and more about kicking the tires on the infrastructure. It's all noise and is relatively worthless (especially if you are getting feedback from techies on a non-techie product) but you can certainly tighten the screws after your system gets a real honest pounding.
Occasionally it's actually good (re: techie feedback on non technie product).
We designed Fork the Cookbook[0] to be highly accessible by the common food blogging mom. We went out to them, and they hated the idea of forking recipes (very strange thing: our target market has this concept that "what's mine is mine. nobody is allowed to steal it. forking a recipe is stealing")
On the other hand, we have had good responses from the techie people. That makes for a bloody confusing audience pivot.
I guess in our case it's more of discovering the product market fit
I am not sure if you have since pivoted, but here are 2 thoughts from a non-technical perspective:
1) I think "fork the cookbook" is awesome for a tech target audience, maybe not so much for a non-technical target audience. Forking has instant grok-ability with tech people but outside of that vector it's not immediately apparent.
2) Because of #1 (but I do think your core idea is close), what about something wherein the concept isn't "forking" a recipe (i.e. taking an existing one and mutating it) but rather, a "this is my take on that same dish" type approach.
User 1 uploads a recipe for potato casserole.
User 2 discovers this recipe and has a slight twist on it, and rather than "forking" User 1's recipe, rather directly posts their own recipe. But a linkage between the two is created (where I guess the PK could be considered "potato casserole"), such that future users looking for potato casseroles would stumble across both. Or, when a user discovers User 1's version, the linkage could be represented as "Or, try THIS variant". Incorporate rating/votings (presumably you already have this).
It's probably extremely close to what you already have, but removes the tech connotation and even though it is extremely philosophically close to your original idea, make it removes the linkage in peoples' minds that anyone is "stealing" their recipe.
