IndieVC on Idea Validation: "Create a landing page. Spend $50 on adwords."
In response to a Tyler Tringas tweet about options for getting traction in 2018, IndieVC suggested, "Create a landing page for this “great idea” with an option to buy. Spend $50 on adwords. See if anyone hits the buy button."
Who has done this effectively? How did you target your ads? How much did you spend per click?
Who has written the definitive guide on, "How to (in)validate your idea with a landing page and $50 on adwords."
Spending $50 might get you 2 clicks, depending on your keywords.
That being said, it's usually harder to convert paid traffic in my experience. So if you can validate with AdWords, then your organic conversion rate is likely to be higher.
I think it's worth testing $50-100 in AdWords to see if you can get a little traction, if your CPC is low enough to get at least 25 clicks.
The hard part is that there are so many reasons why your AdWords campaign might not be converting -- the keywords, the LP experience, the offer, the copy, the ads, etc.
So the risk is that you spend $50-100 and learn only that a certain combination of those things does not work, but you haven't really validated your idea.
I've done AdWords campaigns for large successful companies that are way beyond product market fit and are growing rapidly. Sometimes we tried a $10k test spend on some keywords or a topic area and failed completely.
In other words, AdWords success can mean your idea is valid but AdWords failure can mean many different things.
Great post! And I'm saying that as someone who doesn't have the answer, but wants it!
I spent about $75 on FB and Twitter ads on an app a couple of years ago. I wanted to try adwords, but the cost was way too high. I could see mistakes I made in real-time though! Biggest mistake I remember was not selecting an age range on FB, and it basically targeted the least likely demographic for my app - like 60+.
"Spend $50 on adwords" sounds so easy, but there's so much in there that's difficult for a non-marketer.
Ad copy is hard.
Drilling down on the right keywords is hard. A marketer probably isn't factoring in the $20+/mo tool they use for keyword research.
The "easy" keywords are usually so expensive, you might only get 25-50 clicks.
In the end, I couldn't tell if I invalidated my idea (which, to be honest, probably wasn't very good), or if I invalidated my marketing skills :-P
I did something very similar.
A couple of months ago, I built a little webapp for fun, that let you click a button, pay $1 using Stripe, and receive an auto-generated joke startup idea lie "Be the Uber for Dogs". I called it IdeasAreCheap after the famous Chris Sacca quote.
I posted it here, and on HN, and created a twitter account & jumped on some common hashtags.
Result : $25 in clicks for zero spend!
It also demonstrated to me that putting a payment button on a website ain't actually that easy... so much so that I built Trolley - https://trolley.link - to make it easier to sell things from simple / static sites. Check it out :)
found this article that describes something very similar.
https://sumo.com/stories/80-20-business-idea-validation
I just read and tweeted this, thanks!
interesting side note in article: I always use Bing ads when testing ideas, as it’s SO much cheaper than Google AdWords.
quickmvp.com was built around this idea: they even had service where you pay them and they are running adwords themselves. But seems like the service is not updated last few years.
The Tuft & Needle guys are famous for this. They had someone trying to checkout right away.
I would love to see a definitive guide as well.
Came here to say this. They took the payment even and then refunded it.
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