Curiosity-based validation

While doing research for my upcoming book on how founders validated their SaaS/app ideas, I've discovered an interesting and noval approach to validate new product ideas. Because I couldn't find anyone else talking about this, I decided to call this approach "curiosity-based" validation.

Essentially, this is when the output of your SaaS/mobile app/digital product makes people so curious that they start asking questions:

What's this thing you're using?

WPComplete ($1.5k/mo) is a "mark as complete" Wordpress plugin for people who have online courses.

Paul Jarvis, WPComplete's founder, validated the need for the plugin in a rather unexpected way.

Paul already had a number of courses, which he delivered through Wordpress. Paul needed a plugin so his students could "mark-as-complete" course lessons, so he hired a developer to create one:

I hired Zack as a freelancer to develop a plugin, specifically for my courses, which he did (he did a great job of it too).

What happened after the plugin was deployed was rather unexpected:

What I didn’t know would happen was that the main question I got after adding that functionality to all my courses was students asking, “Hey, your course is great, but can I buy the plugin that lets me track my progress?”. I was getting more emails about the WPComplete functionality than I was about the course content.

The same thing happened to Gilles Bernhard, the founder of SCPlanner ($3.5k/mo), a SoundCloud promotion tool for artists.

Before SCPlanner launched, Gilles demoed the product to prospective users using screenshots:

Before the actual launch, I essentially demoed the product for prospective users. Every time I planned repost promotions for somebody else, I used SCPlanner and sent him a screenshot of my settings and schedule. That way, he know that I had done the work and could easily track when the reposts were being made.

What happened after Giles sent the screenshot was the main reason for launching SCPlanner:

People quickly began asking me what tool I was using and how they could get it. That's when we decided to launch.

How are you doing this?

Your product generates an output. If people find the output compelling enough, they'll ask you "how are you doing this?" This happened with "Get me to Europe" ($300/mo), a newsletter that offers cheap flights deals to Europe:

When my friends saw photos of all the different places I traveled, their curiosity got the best of them: "How the hell are you affording this?" And they were always shocked when I told them.

The exact same thing happened to Scott's Cheap Flights ($320k/mo), one of the most popular services for finding you cheap flight deals:

In late 2013, I found the best deal I've ever gotten in my life: nonstop from New York City to Milan for $130 roundtrip. Milan wasn't even on my radar as a travel destination, but who among us can say no to $130 roundtrip flights to Europe?

When I got back, coworker after coworker asked me to let them know next time I found a fare like that so they could get in on it, too. So rather than try to remember each person I was supposed to alert, I decided to start a simple MailChimp email list instead so I could alert everyone at once. Scott's Cheap Flights was born.

"Powered by" validation

Feedier ($2k/mo), isa tool for accepting feedback from site visitors.

Before launching, Baptiste, Feedier's founder, took the software's output and put it on a website with a "powered by Feedier" button. This alone caused enough people to get curious, click the button and sign up:

We started by buffing up and testing our solution on one of our websites for the WordPress business. This website receives a decent amount of traffic every day so we knew we could use that as a test of our feedback component.

We started by putting our widget on this website, with a sweet Feedier logo in the footer. That got us some early adopters while we were still polishing the admin side.

If people are unable to contact you directly, use a "powered by" button on your software's output as a "gateway" to your main product.

Curiosity = getting closer to product-market fit

If your software generates results that people are want to have, they will become curious and proactive.

They'll ask, "What are you using?" and "How did you do it?" We've seen this with numerous examples above.

How to do curiosity-driven validation for your own product

Take the output of your software and distribute it across your target audience (on communities they hang around, using cold outreach and so on.)

If you're using partnerships and can't directly reach your audience, use a "powered by" button like Feedier.

Then take a seat and watch. Will you get enough people to contact you and ask you questions like "how did you do that?" or "what are you using to accomplish that?" If yes, then you're one step closer to finding a product-market fit.