Is it safe to build for people you know?

Only if you're genuinely one of them. I let myself build on 2 paying yeses in groups I'm deeply inside, because asking peers for money feels awkward. I've used that exception honestly, and it worked. I've also used it twice when it wasn't true, and both of those products are dead.

3 weeks at the dining table

I had my kitchen redone, and for 3 weeks I worked from the dining table while a builder and a decorator worked around me. I liked them both enormously. Every evening they sat in the van outside, turning the day's voice memos into written quotes for other customers, typing slowly on a phone, often till dark.

So I built a tool that turned a voice note into a clean written quote, with items, quantities and a total. A language model did the hard part, and a check made sure every number in the quote appeared in the voice note. It took a week, and it was rather good. Both of them said yes, and both paid.

What I told myself

That I was inside the trade. I'd seen the van. I knew how they worked.

I'd spent 3 weeks next to 2 people in one trade, as a customer. I didn't know a single other builder or decorator, where they talked, or what they read. The only route to anybody else was through 2 people who were far too busy to tell anybody.

Nobody else ever heard of it. By month 3 I'd stopped opening it. It lived 4 months.

The test for being a peer

Write the names of 5 people in that group you've never had as a customer, who'd recognise your name. If you can, the exception may be fair. If you can't, you need the full 10 conversations and 3 people paying, like anybody else.

Nobody Bought It has both peer-excuse autopsies. The rules page has the rule.