Feedback: A service that helps early-stage founders validate their product idea
Hey IH!
This is my first post here so hopefully I'm doing it right!
A common problem I see early-stage founders facing is whether or not it's worth building their product idea.
If they choose to dive in and build, they risk spending thousands of dollars and countless hours building something that nobody actually wants.
It's a bit of a dilemma.
And so I came up with the idea to validate with Minimum Viable Messaging.
I write clear and compelling messaging. You stick it on a landing page and put it in front of your target customers. Then you see if they sign up to the waitlist. A direct (and more importantly valid) measure of interest.
So I'm curious if this is something early-stage founders would be interested in.
I've done a little landing page of my own here: https://spiel.agency/mvm
I'd appreciate you checking it out and giving me your feedback.
Particular questions I have are:
Is this solving a useful problem?
Does the price of the service feel like good value?
Would you prefer a more expensive service that includes the landing page design?
Thanks in advance!
Is it a paid service? How would you prepare to make it scalable?
Yep a paid service. It probably doesn't scale in the true sense of the word. To grow it would simply involve reaching capacity with my time and then bringing in freelance support and eventually hiring to expand out that capacity.
I feel like the biggest problem in terms of validation relies more in finding the right people from your target customer to put your product/landing page in front of, rather than the actual communication on the landing page.
I'm sure there may be a niche of people that would rather have someone working on the communication side of things for them, but I'm not sure if I would pay to have the message being written. But this is just me and may not correspond to the general perspective from other founders.
Hey Leo thanks for the feedback! This is a really great point and one I've pondered since thinking about the idea.
I think ultimately it's probably that both are important parts of the equation but I can see how getting the page to the right people is arguably a harder problem to solve.
Yeah I think if you could manage to somehow find prospects from a specific target customer and also build the communication around that specific customer could be great, but on the other hand it's tricky to be starting a product that solves 2 problems as it's often a better approach to focus on a single problem at a time.
I'm sure you'll find an answer to this as you speak with more founder. Wishing you great luck.
Yeah it's a bit of a dilemma but well worth thinking about! Thanks Leo!
Is this idea a Landing Page builder for running Marketing Smoke Tests? One can do it with a landing page builder or email marketing form builder. What's the unique value proposition of MVM?
Great question! The difference is that generally the messaging that founders produce for testing their idea is poor quality and doesn't give the product the fighting chance it deserves.
Most landing pages I see for this purpose are vague and confusing and so it's no wonder they don't get any interest.
With MVM I'd be coming up with the initial messaging strategy and writing the copy for the landing page.
I see, thanks for clarifying. It wasn't clear from your original post. And that might be a problem ;-)
So, it's a turnkey landing page solution. That might have its niche.
How do you measure the quality of the produced page, to justify that it's better than what founders come up with? Are you going to have A/B/C testing baked in?
I feel like it's opening a can of worms :D
No problem - thanks for pointing out the confusion!
Yeah it's a good question. I think the key value lies in validating the idea rather than is my messaging better than theirs, but I can see why testing the two together at least proves the ROI of hiring me to do it.
Opening cans of worms is my favourite thing to do haha!