How do you validate your idea?

Short Version: If you can truly ship something in 2 weeks, just ship it. :)

Longer version:

I do not believe you are going to get the data you need from Facebook + Ads.

Don't get me wrong, I strongly believe in generating a pool of early potential customers (I have spent the last 7 years building tools to do just this).

Feedback on a non-existing product is a false positive waiting to happen. Jason Cohen famously asked friends/bloggers if they would pay for something that did not exist, but his concept was simple. There were zero great WP hosts. Would you pay if one existed....who says no?

This too is not universal advice. My view on products/mvps is very constrained (https://scottw.com/my-definition-mvp).

The bigger the product, the more upfront work you need to do. But the sooner you get something which works in front of your customers (and they can pay you), the sooner you will get real feedback.

The first thing you have to do is to decide what do you want to measure and what values do you define as a success or failure. For example, if you would like to see if there is interest in your product, you could build a nice landing page, show features and add a sign in form.

Then, you measure out of N visitors, M signed up. The percentage M/N is greater than your success parameter, you move forward. It is lower, you stop and think.

If you go through this path, it is important that you establish beforehand what you expect, how much you paid for every sign up, etc. It is also important to capture information about the visitors. If you just see how many arrived to your landing page you won't be able to reach out to let them know about your product.

Also, make it look like you already have something, not like 'hey, I'm testing.' In that case you'll be able to see how many sign up for a product and not for a newsletter.

Once you validated the product, you can move to validating the business model.

In any case, each reality may be different. Perhaps you do need an MVP to validate, or you need money because you need infrastructure, etc. What never changes is the fact that you need to decide beforehand what is that you are validating, what experiment you will perform and your definition of success or failure.

If you are in love with your product and you don't care whether it is a good business or not, the path is completely different.

Ads don't give you the detail you need. Here's what I've done and advised people to do in the past. It takes literally a day or less.

In the following three areas, figure out your top three assumptions:

Desirability: your user risks. (eg: enterprise businesses with 100-500 employees need a way to track employee growth goals.)

Viability: your business risks. (eg: these enterprise businesses will pay for a month-on-month SaaS subscription, and we can be profitable selling it that way.)

Feasibility: your technology risks. (eg: we can build the growth goal tracker in a way that can scale with the time, team, and resources at our disposal.)

Take no more than a day, and find quick and dirty answers for those hypotheses. You're not allowed to answer from your existing knowledge, but you don't have to spend any money to validate them. Cold call experts (you should definitely talk to people at least for desirability); go and ask people on the street if your desirability hypothesis is a consumer play. The goal is to learn, so let them do the talking.

If you're lucky, you'll learn unique insights that may iterate what you're working on but will allow you to serve your user's need better. The important thing is to be willing to change your idea based on imperfect feedback.

Then, based on what you've learned, make the shittiest prototype you can - I'm seriously talking Sharpies and paper; don't code until after you've validated - and find some prospective users to test on. The reason you test with a low fidelity prototype is that users will project their own assumptions onto it; you'll learn more about what they really want. If you test with something that looks real, they'll give you really superficial feedback, often about the design.

Iterate your idea based on what you've learned, rinse, and repeat. Your idea is de-risked before you wrote any code - and you didn't have to spend any money to do it.

This is not a productive comment, but I had to share my 5c.

I agree with most people here who say if an MVP is doable in 2 weeks just do it. It’s always better to give people something to play with than attract their attention briefly with the website with promises and watch them leave and never remember of you again.

I’m probably not the best role model, but my "MVP" took 6 months to make. But I think the effort really paid off — more than it would if I had an unpolished made-in-2-weeks version for sure. On the other hand, I had a lot of faith in the idea, so I let myself spend that much time without prior validation.

Besides, I think that’s just the problem with modern startups. Instead of putting effort into making one truly good product and investing into it, makers choose the "let’s throw it at the wall and see what sticks" approach and make dozens of mediocre products. Unfortunately, most of those get their moment under the sun on PH, and in just a few days no one talks about them anymore.

This said, in your case your best friend is networking. Tell your idea around, see how others feel about it. Personally I wouldn’t spend money on ads if I had nothing to show. I’m still not spending it — unless I have a stable fully functional version for both Android and iOS, it would be money burnt.

It highly depends on the product.

If your future users are on Facebook and if the idea can be communicated well in a simple and quick landing page, then maybe this will provide the needed validation of your idea.

But then, maybe not. Maybe your users are not on Facebook? Maybe, just maybe, users clicking on a fake, quickly made landing page does not give the right signal?

If you can build an MVP in two weeks, you might just do that and then you can test if the users will respond to something real.

The best way to validate ideas is to measure behavior data of potential client. I will tell you examples:

1. If your client tell he has a problem X, and you tell them shortly about a solution you are building for that problem, there are 2 outcomes:
   -If client says wow that's nice. And he doesn't ask anything else. He is probably not interested.
   -If client starts asking questions and asks to give a try of your product. You just found something painful and you should stick with it.
2. Another example would be landing page. I remember someone made a landing page of specific advertising solution to mobile apps. That was an epic solution that made me to leave my email and even contact them to ask when they are going to start.

I always think this way for now, that your idea or potential market to your idea is not validated if users rarely leaves email, rarely respond you, doesn't take action to ask something about your product.

That's behavioral data.

Try to find people that could potentially buy your product. Talk to them and pitch them. If you find any make the landing, collect emails and see how it goes. If you grow the list to let's say 1000 emails, then go to the next step and build and MVP. Charge for it and sent it to your email list. Did you get any sale? Yes? Go on. No? Try a bit more and if nothing happens, move to the next idea.

There is no validation without effort. Either you are coding something or you are finding customers in the ocean.

You should DM some potential customers and interview them. That will tell you pretty quickly where you can help solve their problems.

Do you have a competitor?

If it is something that would take under 1 month to build it consider putting an MVP together first and then looking to drive traffic to the MVP.

The problem with landing page only is you get a lot of signups from people that will forget about you by the time you put out a product. So if it's a possibility to have a small MVP with some auto emails it would be a lot better. You also get people that are interested. Use the emails to try and start a conversation with the signups.

I've done the meetup and chatting to people approach on my latest product and it seems to have worked well but finding meetup can be tricky.

This comment was deleted 8 years ago