Ask IH: What specifically would help you validate businesses faster?
What five things would take you personally from “this is a cool idea” to “1,000 people paid me for this” in a week instead of six months?
What five things would take you personally from “this is a cool idea” to “1,000 people paid me for this” in a week instead of six months?
For me it's all about people. The faster I can find my target audience, the better. There's pretty much always a Facebook group with 30K+ people for nearly every niche, or a subreddit or forum of similar size and clout.
Then, I'll usually post a landing page with email capturing, then email all my new leads individually, learn about what they want, develop a prototype/MVP and ask for money. Sometimes as simple as a spreadsheet. That's validation to me.
Awesome, thanks. Let me see if I understood:
How long does that realistically take for each idea and what one thing would drastically reduce the time, effort and cost of that? Thanks!
The size of the group doesn't matter, it's how well the group matches up with your niche. If you're selling to lawn care professionals, you could post on /r/entrepreneur, but probably a very small portion of them would be interested in what you're selling. I make sure to follow the typical format for landing pages, emphasize exactly what's valuable, sometimes do a bootstrap mockup of what it might look like (this works well, just started doing it). Then it's all about being personal with the people that sign up for the mailing list, how it's valuable to them in their specific situation. My last project that I validated (and I'm working on now) is curated leads for Amazon FBA products. While the final platform is going to be a polished, filterable database of leads, the MVP I'm selling now is literally just a spreadsheet. And if it sells, then and only then will I put in the time and effort into building out the real thing.
I try to keep my idea turnover rate very high. Less than one week from idea to launch. The first dollar takes more time because you have to take time to learn more about your customers but usually on launch day I have an idea of whether or not it will earn any money. That way, I can keep working through ideas until I find something that really sticks :)
Damn, you’ve really got it down!! Thanks!
I found this. https://www.javelin.com/beta
Would a tool like this make your process easier?
I'm super sceptical of these services. There is no way to on-demand validate an idea without asking a very niche audience.
To do that, you really need to know where they hang out and how to craft a message that resonates. All these services that claim to validate your idea sound like scams to me.
Maybe they drive some incredibly untargeted traffic to a landing page or pay some people to answer a survey using mechanical turk. Either way, that tells you nothing about whether your business is good. It's all vanity metrics.
One question that helped me a lot: "do I know, personally, 5 people who find value in this". If not, forget about it. Period.
Direct access to targeted audience, which is difficult given that they're in another country and some (or most) don't speak the same language.
I am in this boat as well. I will be launching an MVP for a niche search engine soon.
My plan is the cap number of searches and disallow pagination until user fills out a survey giving me their email, details about themselves, and estimation of how much they would pay for unlimited access. Regardless of their response, I will lift the limits. If no one fills out survey, it will indicate people dont care enough. If people fill it out but dont commit to paying when they can easily lie, thats another red flag.
After MVP is launched (which took me around a month to build), I will not add any more features till I get 200 people to agree to pay at least $10 / mo for it (via survey). I'm assuming half wont follow through.
Until I attain this, my plan is to use all my time and energy to focus on marketing via cold emails, getting backlinks, and social media. I hang out in a subreddit where my target audience is active and have accured some karma there. I also have scraped around 2k emails of my target audience from various sources. Around 100k users / mo search for the keywords my search engine aims to make easier, hence the focus on SEO.
Hope this gives you some ideas... it is very difficult to get validation from 1000 people in one week unless you are industrsy leader IMO. I am an outsider in this market, so most of my cold emails pre-MVP went unanswered (this could also be a bad sign). I decided to spend time making an MVP just to be sure before I abandon the idea and also to show my leads I am serious.
One example is Stripe. All they had to do was announce that they were making a payment processor service that didn't suck. So really it just comes down to raw demand. However, unmet demand like that is usually around a very hard problem space--it's not a weekend app idea.
Thank you for responding. You did not answer the question I asked.