28 (non-paying) subscribers in 8 hours - is this validation?
I launched by sustainable food inspiration newsletter a few days ago. The idea is simple: enter your nearest city and your diet and you'll be sent a few beautiful recipes and an interesting article or two a week, all personalised to you and your local produce.
Today I posted a simple post to /r/sustainability asking what people's experience was with awareness of food sustainability. I added a link to Agricultured in a comment.
56 people have visited the site since then, and 28 subscribed. Is this enough to start putting serious effort into the backend 'recipe engine', and am I missing anything obvious?
In short, no because they haven't started paying you yet. It's easy enough to put in your email to subscribe for free information, but much harder to put down your credit card information unless it's solving a real pain point.
What is the problem you are trying to solve?
Essentially the problem I’ve personally encountered is a lack of resource for sustainable/seasonal food. Whilst almost anyone you speak to now understands what’s healthy or not, few understand what’s sustainable
First off, nice job getting something out there and converting 50% of the viewers into subscribers. Most folks don't get this far! The next thing I would do...I'd find a way to as quickly and inexpensively as possible create an upsell opportunity for the folks that have subscribed.
Validating an "idea" and validating a "viable business" isn't the same thing. If you're looking to build a business out of this, aka make money, you won't really do that until you have an opportunity for someone to trade their money for the value you're delivering. You've laid some nice groundwork, but keep iterating in small steps and testing your assumptions before diving into months of work on paid features that may not work out.
Thanks Andrew, I appreciate the feedback!
You’re totally right about needing to upsell. I’m still debating if I go for a direct subscription model, or leveraging the niche audience and going for sponsorship/ad opportunities
I might encourage you to go find the answer to that question rather than debate it internally. Chat with a few sponsors, see what the market looks like. Talk to your subscribers and ask for their credit card info. A handful of short conversations will be much more efficient and effective than noodling on things yourself.
I'm saying this as much for me as I am for you...I'm really bad about sitting in my basement and trying to invent answers rather than going out and getting the answers from the people who ultimately matter.
There is no single canonical "yes/no" truth of what consists of "validation".
Besides, validating an idea has generally multiple parts: e.g. validating that the problem you are solving is real, validating that you have large enough market, validating that you can reach the market in a cost-efficient way, validating that your solution will solve the problem before you fully build the solution etc.
In your case, I'd say that It's a great start and the conversion rate is fantastic but having 50 or so subscribers signing up for a free newsletter from niche a sub-reddit is really not a strong validation. My main concern would be the "depth" of that specific niche traction channel, i.e. can you continue gaining traction -- where will you get the next 50, then next 100, then 1000, etc.
Finally, how strong "confidence" in the validation you need depends on how much time you are going to spend on the solution -- if you're not building anything massive then maybe your current validation is enough to progress to next stage.
Good luck
The fact that the subs came from a niche subreddit was a big sorry of mine. You’re right, I’m still not sure if I can replicate it across other niches, or in a wider audience.
Thanks for the stages of validation! That’s really helpful
Sounds like a great start! I dig the idea.
Do you select the recipes manual currently? Do you see any part that you can automate so that it will make a manual process faster?
I’m currently still building a way to partially automate the recipe selections since it’s just not feasible to do it for hundreds of cities across the world!
I can automatically tag a users location with a climate zone, and from that know what food is currently in season there. From there I can find recipes that fit the bill.
Hopefully by the end of January I’ll have something that can scale pretty well
EDIT: It's now at 37
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Bouncing off of this (thanks for the tag, Jas!) --
If you're serious about wanting to grow this, then yes. Build it out further. When I created Budget Meal Planner, I had validation the second I had 10 people subscribe. If I could get 10 people to subscribe then I had the confidence I could get 100, and so on.
From then, if I could get 1 out of 100 to pay, then I knew I could get more.
As long as you're providing quality, consistent content, it will be successful from my experience.
The second I fell off with providing quality + consistency, the project died and that's when I looked to someone else to revive it. Which I'm happy to see it is still going strong without me!
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