Lately I've been learning what it means to validate a product idea. I've been absorbing all sorts of insightful comments and content from various communities, including Indie Hackers.
During this ingest, I got the impression that validating an idea was as simple as putting up a landing page, driving some traffic to it, and measuring the results. Being a Developer by trade, this seemed very doable, and seemingly too good to be true.
Either way, I wanted to give it a try to get a feel for what this sort of process looked and felt like. So I selected an idea, one that I knew was somewhat shaky, and forged ahead with my first real attempt at validating a product idea.
The Idea
The idea is simple. Lately, in an effort to embed myself within my target market (new developers), I have been helping people increase their chance of landing a job by providing them with notes on how to clean up their resume. Some have even managed to land jobs or internships, so it seemed like a valuable service.
I got a lot of interest from job seeking Web Developers, so I thought to myself, maybe these people would be interested in paying someone with a lot of industry experience to create their resume for them. I'm a Senior Developer, so maybe they would pay me to do.
Touching Base
With my idea in mind, I set out to talk to some of the people I've helped to get some quick feedback on the idea. I only talked to five people, but out of the five people, four said they would be interested in a service like that. The fifth felt like the resume services provided by their College for free was sufficient but would be interested if there was more value added to the idea.
So I took my verbal 80% validation of the idea and decided to keep going. It seemed, at least from my correspondence so far, the idea might have legs.
A Landing Page
Next it was time to build my landing page. I knew I wanted to keep my validation approach cheap, so I rolled my own instead of using a service. I've got the skills to build and host websites, so I figured I might as well put them to use and save as much money as I could.
I purchased the domain resumehack.io, which was much more expensive than I would like, and setup a little one page site on my existing Digital Ocean node.
I kept the landing page short and to the point while trying to explain the value of what I was selling. There are three call to actions throughout the page, so I could measure the progress of peoples interest as they walked through the pitch.
At the end of the pitch, I included a sense of urgency and demand, as well as a sign up form that they could use to be alerted when the service was available.
Feel free to check out the landing page here: https://resumehack.io. I'd appreciated any feedback on it in general. In total it cost me $40, which I suppose is pretty good considering.
Driving Traffic
The next step was to get the landing page some traffic. To do this I took a couple approaches. First I sent out a message on my social media, which is an unfortunately small network. This received little to no interested, which I was expecting.
Second, I added referral call to actions at the bottom of some of my blog articles that relate to job searching and that receive decent traffic. This approach was much better for several reasons. Most importantly, it was free. The traffic also had a lower bounce rate, and I'm guessing had traffic that were more likely to convert considering the type of referral content it was coming from.
Lastly, I signed up for paid advertising on reddit.com and Google Adwords to target programming and tech communities. I kept a really small budget of $20/day and only ran it for a few days.
In total I spent $52 dollars on marketing. ~$10 was spent on google adwords but I turned that off after a few hours when I realized how high their bounce rate was. The rest was reddit ads.
Those are the reddit ad stats, for anyone interested.
Measuring
Here are some images that illustrate what the traffic looked like. I know it's not a lot of traffic, but I still think it painted an interest picture.
There is one goal conversion (sign up) but that was me testing that all the pistons were firing, so you can ignore that one. In total, 90 users visited the landing page with a bounce rate of about half and a conversion rate of zero.
As far as the user behavior, you can see that a lot of people clicked on the first call to action, which was basically just a "Tell me more" button. The interesting part for me was the drop off of click throughs for the second CTA. After the first CTA is when the "how it works" is explained but also the "how much". My guess is that the users clicked through, read the price, and then decided to leave.
What I learned
I should note that this was over an extremely short period of time. I came up with the idea and within a week I had put up a landing page, ran through some traffic, and then considered the idea invalid.
Maybe that's not long enough to iron out the wrinkles, but even with the small amount of data, I got the impression the product wasn't viable with it's existing proposition.
So what did I learn? Lots, actually. I learned that putting together a landing page is both easy and fun. I also learned that I really enjoy measuring user behavior. I find it really interesting to see how people work from an analytical stand point.
I learned that using Google Adwords, at least for how fast I want to move, is not a viable option. I learned how to talk to potential customers and how to interpret their responses. For example, there's a difference between what someone will say versus what they will actually do.
Most of all, I learned that although validating an idea with a landing page is doable, I'm beginning to believe it's only a small part of the bigger picture.
Now, on to figuring out what the bigger picture actually is.
Thanks for reading!