Blog
-- Thoughts on data analysis, software
development and innovation management. Comments are welcome
Post 69
On using Hacker News to validate a product idea involving NLP and PHP
12-Jul-2012
The first step to creating a valuable product is to discover what it is
exactly wanted or needed by the target customers. The Lean Startup
process states it straight, and the Pragmatic Programmer even provides
a means to find it out by asking Hacker News (HN). HN is a vibrant
community of tech people, hackers is its broadest sense... and
entrepreneurs (these concepts need not be disjoint), which can provide
a lot of insight into the value of a product idea.
Now, my product idea: a general-purpose Natural Language Processing (NLP)
toolkit coded in PHP. This is certainly a long
wanted
product
(note that the two links date back to 2008),
and for a sensible reason: the Internet is bloated with textual
content, so let's develop a NLP tool that is focused on processing
text on the web. In this sense, the PHP programming language, i.e.,
by definition, the Hypertext Preprocessor, should be a practical choice
with which to do it. Moreover, PHP is the default platform that is available
on a web server. Then, all the elements seem to be in the right place.
And the problem seems to be addressed logically this way, but it
still needs positive feedback from the end users (the developers)
to succeed. Note that none of the currently available
NLP toolkits reported in the Wikipedia list
has been developed in PHP, so there must be a niche of improvement here,
or must there be something wrong going on? Why is it so?
Perhaps the product was not interesting a few years ago, maybe it did not
catch up because of marketing issues, or using the many bindings
and wrappers available was just enough in contrast to putting the effort in doing
it all again from scratch... Therefore, the question naturally arises:
is it really interesting to the community? If so, to what extent?
Is it worth the bother? Will this be a profitable project? Would it
be nuts to rely solely on Ian Barber's
opinion?
These questions require some scientific experimentation, so I built a
prototype
(mainly based on text classification, which has 24 GitHub watchers
at this time of writing; thanks for your interest, indeed) and
submitted it
to HN. What I found out was contrary to what I expected: the general interest in this
kind of product is essentially nonexistent, just in line with what had already happened
with the previous approaches. I failed. OK. At least I now know by myself it's nonsense to
invest in this product. I'd better do something else. Fine. Let's keep
engineering. The upside is that I practised some PHP (my skills with this language
were getting a little rusty) and (more importantly) I learnt that businesses
need solutions, not tools to develop solutions (this conclusion is derived
directly from the only -ironic- comment that appears in HN, which was
motivated by the demo app that I provided where I trained the classifier
with a popular research dataset only as a proof of concept). That's awesome! If I had
dismissed the so-valuable Lean Startup directive, assuming that the world
was just how I saw it, I would have "wasted" (please note the quotation
marks) a whole lot of time
developing something nobody would pay for (I'm being rather like
Edison here, I know). This is an undoubtedly good
"lesson learned".
Needless to say, though, if I ever get to obtain economic support for its
development, I will gladly resume the coding phase!
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