Will you start with something that seems to be valid only to you?
Hi!
During the day, I have many ideas of apps that could help me to do better what I do. as I'm not special, my first thought usually is: "wow, this is super awesome!", I want to build it. but when I try to validate the idea somehow, I usually don't get too much interest from people. (I usually try to validate through google ads, or asking on HN, Twitter, or Slack channels).
Even knowing that an idea didn't get too much interest and failed this initial validation, I have the feeling that it can be useful, at least for me, for sure.
So, my question is: Would you go for the idea even having this negative initial interest?
I've launched some iOS apps in past that were not very successful. I've launched a JIRA plugin that although useful, it's not very successful also.Now, I'd like to launch something else again as a side project that could potentially become a product in the near future.
What're your thoughts on that?
Validating an idea or something someone else "might" use, and validating an MVP with actual customers are two completely different activities.
Even if you make an MVP, if you approach people broadly and put yourself out there, or approach people who are not your target market, they universally say "oh cool, it seems like a decent idea -- I could see someone using this."
Sum that across an arbitrarily large population and you have zero users. As long as you take that approach you're never going to get any useful data, positive or negative, on how marketable an idea is. Just a bunch of people saying it looks kind of cool.
Do some things that don't scale. Think of the specific user that you specifically think will benefit from your product. Think of where they hang out. Approach individuals directly and ask whether they, specifically, will benefit from it if you give it to them.
THEN you're gathering useful data. Even if they absolutely hate it and find it to be utterly useless, that's an actual real-world data point. Collect enough of those and THEN you know whether it's a viable idea.
Consider this: You have no special skills for guesstimating whether other people might find your product useful. Neither does anyone else -- except the people who need the product. Getting 100 opinions from different people who have nothing to do with your product is no better than guessing yourself 100 times.
Also, you will uniformly find that "hypothetical validation" will fail all the really valuable ideas. It's the ideas that people think of as stupid and wrong and ridiculous that make change.
Thanks, Lewis. Yes, your considerations make sense to me, especially paying more attention to validation approaches that don't scale. Maybe these ones are the most effective ones for validating early stage ideas.
That's exactly how I launched my startup. I needed something for my sales team and it didn't exist.
Did you validate the idea somehow? or you just "go for it" because it was something you're needing? What was your reasoning to invest your time to create something risking that this something could be useful just for you/your team?