Getting early users/customers to validate idea
How do people go about finding early users to help validate an idea without sounding greedy or snobby? My first thought was to contact people/blogs (related to the product) through their contact forms and ask if they know anyone interested in trying a early version of an app. Or perhaps forums and message boards of those users targeted.
I don't see it hurting doing so, but I could see responses like "Why would I try your app and give you feedback"? I guess the answer to that would be "because it solves a problem for you" if they really come back with a response like that.
But I am interested in how people get those initial contacts/customers to even validate ideas.
Shameless plug, anyone is welcome to help me validate if interested, www.usepyramid.com :)
I think the best validation is to ask for money. "Will you give me $10 to use my product?"
I could be wrong but it looks like you're competing with crazyegg, so your market has been validated. Probably helps to see why their homepage is a little more clear than yours https://www.crazyegg.com
Your headline is good. Your starting paragraph is also decent and pretty good. Maybe you need more screenshots and examples?
Something Gary Vaynerchuk talks about a lot is providing value.
So one thing you can think about is how you can provide value to people and start there when you are doing cold outreach. Then once you have helped them you can start to ask for input. So in your case maybe "I'd love to give you a 30 minute consult about improving your website" or something and just see if you can get your foot in the door that way. Once you've helped someone they'll be much more likely to help you.
Hey Radar, I'm a bit late , but I validate all my ideas using cold email.
Basically I email 1,000 potential customers about my idea.
After I email 1,000 people I should either get enough customers or have enough conversations to determine if I’m building something people will pay for.
I wrote a longer step-by-step guide on Medium last week:
https://medium.com/@dk/how-i-validate-all-my-business-ideas-4d063d64feed
Hope this helps!
Hey dylan, thanks for chiming in and for the reference to your post, I'll check it out!
I checked your site and I was not sure what is the core problem your site is trying to solve. Could you elaborate?
Thanks for the input. I clearly need to put more time into the site to focus more on the problem it solves. Something that will come if the idea is validated.
The idea is simple, it allows anyone designing any kind of interface to basically crowd source feedback on what they see or focus on. The app offers the option to blur or grayscale the image (landing page, mockup, design, etc) to obscure details allowing the user (stake holders, users, testers) to simple focus on what catches their eye, which they click/tap on. This is tracked then overlayed over the uploaded design for the designer to see and judge if that's what they want the users to first focus on visually.
I thought this might be valuable since the amount of time users stay on sites is sometimes fairly limited, so it'll help designers make sure users are focusing on what they want.
I would also make sure you clearly differentiate your pitch from all other products that do user tracking (Crazy Egg, Hotjar etc.)
Thanks for the advice. I wasn't even aware of hotjar or crazy egg, so thanks for pointing those out. I think the main difference with my idea is it's focused on finding the user's focus before it's even built/developed. I'll try to emphasize that on the homepage.