How do I validate that a market exists for my idea?

Cool idea. Validation is more of a see-saw than one-time event. You're never going to be 100% sure that the market is enthusiastic about your product in particular until they're using it en masse. Hell, I've talked to people who've had customers write them checks for preorders, only to cancel before the product is released!

The best you can do is gather enough clues and evidence to build up your confidence in proceeding to the next step, whatever that is.

Your product in particular is straightforward enough that I would personally feel comfortable building something. For example, maybe your MVP is you build a form/wizard that helps people choose the big ticket items that they're interested in saving money on. Put it here and on Reddit and tell people that you're still building the alerts product itself, but you're interested in seeing if this first step of the experience is useful.

That way you can be honest and gauge interest. You can also get a crucial part of your product built and tested.

Another idea would be to niche down. Your product is dangerously general-purpose, so it will always be hard to find an appropriate place to get your first foothold. Unless it goes totally viral and spreads by word of mouth across people in different industries, which it might! But it's not safe to count on that.

Instead, what you could do is focus on one segment first. Random example: weightlifting equipment. Or gaming. Or Amazon products. Or IKEA furniture. Whatever place you think people really care about savings and are willing to wait. (Scott's Cheap Flights is a related example.) Build a very, very simple product around that, and show it to the appropriate sub-Reddit, which should now be easy to identify.

Hello tma,

Just two weeks back I thought of a product very similar to this(except I was only concentrating on Amazon and referral commission for profits). I dropped out of this idea now.

Don't say that it is a demo to users. Let users submit their interest and collect it (its very easy to collect user data, use things typeform or if you host on www.netlify.com they even provide easy form submission mechanism for free.

You can write a simple python code to do a daily web search (it may not be efficient but you don't need to worry about performance initially), python requests code or even better
https://www.page.rest

Once the user base increase you can go for stronger architecture.

If you want to know my plan of approach you can contact me at
kishore (at) tealpod.com

Goodluck,
Kishore

I think this is great advice from @csallen on focusing on a particular segment first. As a well as it being hard to find a foothold, I also think you will find it harder to make sense of the customer feedback you are getting, as different segments may have different needs/problems to address - a more focused approach should make it easier to distill the responses down in to something meaningful which you can act upon. It definitely sounds like an idea worth testing though.

Agree with csallen. It would be helpful to verify the type of products people want before you build anything. When gathering emails you could ask what products they want the puppies to be looking for.

One of the best ways to validate an idea is to see if anyone's built something similar ... and yes, there are lots of price alert / monitoring things that have been built over the years. A little Google search brings up a ton of them:

https://www.google.com/search?q=price+alerts

I would say that if your product is legitimately differentiated somehow then go for it. Just make sure you can tell people why it's better than everything else out there.

Is there any way you can provide the value of the product without building all the tech behind it first?

You're already collecting an email address, if you added a second form input where I can paste the URL of a product I'm interested in, then it doesn't matter if there's fancy tech doing the work behind the scenes, or if you're just accessing that link manually every day and hand-writing me an email if it's cheaper than it was yesterday.

Then your experiment evolves from "how do I know people want this?", to "can I get 10 / 50 / 100 people to give me a link to a product they want cheaper?"

Sandorie here,

Nice page btw. Super user friendly and easy to read.

As for not having an actual product/demo. Do some quick MVP ( if it takes more than a week is not an MVP btw.)
Some simple code, but that in contrast delivers a "pixel" of what "the big picture" for your customers could be. If their problem is urgent enough they should be pretty happy with just a "pixel", and in return they will ask you to build the whole "picture"

Ask yourself: who wants this right now? Who wants this so much that they'll use it even when it's a scrappy version, made by someone they have never heard of? ( with all due respect )

You could get some initial set of users by doing a comparatively untargeted launch, and then to observe which kind seem most enthusiastic, and seek out more like them. ( market)

Hope it helps.

Cheers!