The original, $10 million X Prize (for the first private space flights) was launched this way. They did a huge press conference to launch the prize competition, and got the head of NASA and a bunch of astronauts there.
Peter Diamandis later said he didn't have a dime of the prize money at the time -- he quietly raised it later. In the meantime, everyone just assumed he had it because the launch event had so much credibility attached to it.
Partially. The insurance policy still cost a couple million dollars, which they had to raise. And they didn't purchase the insurance policy until several years after the competition was launched.
Quite a few, actually. There was (is?) a rash of people who create a simple teaser web site that collects contact information from interested parties as their "MVP" to "validate" their idea. No code. No product.
It sounds to me like any other kind of specification writing, simply from a marketing perspective. I can see the benefits, but eh. I'm not really convinced.
The benefits are to bring a clarity and focus to the product development process not always enforced by a spec. Who are you building this for as opposed to what are the features.
Writing specifications, and knowing which items in the roadmap bring the most value to the greatest numbers, are hugely different beasts. I definitely took the PR-driven approach to mean identifying those 2 items, even if taken by themselves (without the rest of the roadmap) they are meaningless. This is a massive, valuable skill to have...and one I'm not sure how to acquire. Don't know if this convinces you, but the article really spoke to me.
That's an interesting idea - Press Driven Development. Has anyone here tried it?