A better way to test my ideas? 💡
I've got a few ideas I'd like to test to see if there is demand for them.
My old approach: Pick something I thought I thought was useful, spend 6 months working on it, find out at launch time that there is little to no demand for it.
My new approach: Setup 4 landing pages, make some UI designs, post them to various places online, see which ideas perform best. I'm estimating around 2-3 days per landing page including designs.
I have a few questions:
- Is this a good way to test an idea? or is there a better way to go about it?
- What's the most efficient way to test an idea without wasting time, but also not putting out a landing page that looks thrown together.
- Should I be spending more time looking at market research?
i.e. https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-i-learned-from-past-mistakes-to-build-a-revenue-generating-product-e3d343259f
I feel like I have a process for designing UI's and developing, but testing an idea and getting traction is still a bit of a black box for me.
--> if you do the above right, it should just be obvious to you what product/service you need to build. It should strike you as really weird that not everybody is building the product.
Good luck.
Thanks Louis, great actionable advice.
I'm developing a website, I'm not sure if people will use it or not, contact me if you will, we can exchange some information
I wonder what do you hope to learn with the landing page? What's the goal? Getting email sign-ups then talking to potential customer? If yes, what answers do you want? What then? How do you know you're solving a problem people will pay for?
I think the landing page idea is better than spending 6 months building something.
Getting good, quality feedback can be so hard. Taking what people say with a grain of salt and understanding the true, core problem vs taking it at face value is such a skill.
Get feedback and iterate the idea or product as fast as possible. Can you do this with the projects you already launched?
The more I learn, the more I think about opportunity costs. The longer it takes me to push something out and get feedback, and iterate, means a longer journey to the end (success or failure).
Great points Ben. After reading through your response and thinking about it I'm realizing the goal isn't just specifically about sign ups.
I think my goals would be:
The tricky part for me is often what I think is a good idea isn't necessarily a solution the customer wants. And sometimes what I think is a trivial idea is what they want!
"Get feedback and iterate the idea or product as fast as possible."
I think you're right this is key for that initial stage of generating actual value for the user so I will focus on that.
Thanks for your reply
Glad it helped. I'm still learning all of this too. Continually.
The biggest challenge I think is not just generating value for the user, I mean, that's the goal, but understanding before you start building, what they see as value. What is the problem you want to solve to then generate that value.
Try to talk to customers and/or find out how they express their pain points in their own language.
I posted it around, and did some cold emailing and the majority of users I spoke to had existing solutions that solved it well enough.
Right, I was thinking I can cut out the initial time development time to find out earlier.
Well, if you did cold emailing you can do it even before creating any landing pages, right?