How did you validate your idea?
It seems like this is an important step that many of us either skip (😅) or don't know how to execute well.
So how'd you do it?
- Drop a link to your product and let us know.
- Leave a comment for someone else if you have tips or feedback!
I just launched the waitlist signup for Subscribe Sense yesterday. MVP is underway with plans for beta to start in a month or so.
To validate the idea, I reached out to a bunch of people on twitter and some other communities I'm in that I knew used email marketing. I first went on their websites to see if they used double opt-in lists, because the problem I'm trying to solve is to reduce the number of people who don't confirm their email during signup.
I talked to about 6 people who ran varying business types, including freelancers, SaaS, ecommerce, and courses. From there, I was able to determine that people running courses were the ones who were most likely to depend on their mailing list as lead generation, so I started to focus on those for my next few calls. I then learned that ConvertKit customers were a great fit for my product, because many of them were actually problem-aware because ConvertKit shows how many subscribers aren't confirmed, whereas most other email marketing platforms don't. I had about 3 calls with ConvertKit customers who I found, all of whom said that the number of unconfirmed subscribers on their list was frustrating and they'd be happy to try something to fix it.
In addition to that, I also scoured the ConvertKit support forums and found lots of posts from people complaining about their unconfirmed subscribers.
Not as thorough a validation as it could be, but given that I also suffered from this problem in my last business and would have gladly paid someone if they could have solved it with minimal configuration work, I feel like that's enough to get started.
I've just written a post on the topic 😅
You can read it here
Long story short, I've learned my lesson and always listened to what people say—always making my product in a way that would solve people's problems. After other startups, with BOWWE, I validated my idea through conversations with my clients and other business owners through thousands of meetings. And through my experience with life and business.
Agreed, this is a really important step to ensure you have a problem that you are solving.
For me, I lived the pain of running a smaller services business and not having one tool to help manage the business, from CRM through to task management to finance. I build some internal tools to help manage the data, and then finally analyze the data to make sense of it and develop projections/business plans and adjustments to the products and services.
After that experience, I looked across small businesses to understand what tools they use, how they use them if they integrate together, and if they get any good business intelligence or analytics on the data in those tools and I found for small businesses the majority of the time the answer was no. They may buy a CRM tool, they'll buy a finance tool, then they don't link together with their task management and they either miss insights or spend hours in excel trying to figure out how to tweak services, better plan, better scope, etc.
The way I looked across small businesses was by simply cold calling or emailing, from my Gmail account, in more of a survey fashion, what tools they used and if they had any frustrations. I was able to speak to about 100 different small businesses in my metro area just to understand if the challenge affected them as well. I leveraged my professional network, and my personal network, and always asked each person I spoke to if they knew anyone else that was in a similar situation. This made it easier to contact the next person if there was some kind of a warm introduction.
I wasn't trying to sell anything, just asking folks questions as to how they run their business and they wound up opening right up.
Long story short, speaking to people, as many people as you can, to validate they have the problem you think you want to solve, and not giving them the solution, but just asking questions helped me to validate my idea.
From here I started to develop Dization, https://dization.com, a hub to connect small business tools together and then automatically analyze the information in them to help small businesses better manage their business.
For https://www.getmeerkat.io/ I first identified that I had a problem that needed solving - I wasn't even trying to think of a business I just kind of said 'man this sucks I wish there was a way to....'
Then it was research - does a solution to this exist? Wow, it actually doesn't. Why is that? (more research).
I built a prototype on Figma that I could use for conversations with potential customers to demonstrate my product.
Next was, 'ok, let me talk to other parents (my target market) and see if they're experiencing the same problem. I was careful to ask questions related to the problem rather than just explain my solution and wait for them to approve (The Mom Test). Once I gathered all that feedback, I showed them the prototype I was working on.
It was near unanimous from parents that the problem I was approaching needed solving, but there were some users who said they would use my product and some who said they wouldn't. To me this was a great signal because I wasn't just getting 100% "Oh yeah I love it and will definitely use it!" answers.
Then I just said fuck it, let's roll! Created it and I'm getting users every day. Right now the app is free and next step is monetizing it and I'm working on a similar process for figuring out the premium features.
Good luck!
product: aquila[.]network
I'm building in the public for the first time. So, mostly I'm crash learning. Right now, I have opened up an MVP with minimal features. A lot of manual processes go behind the scenes like sign-up emailing :). So, when it comes to validation, we look at metrics such as bounce rate, conversion rate, churn rate (which is horrible right now), etc. Then we talk to users. Right now, doing a second iteration incorporating this feedback.
I think the way you're supposed to do it is talk to prospective users and try find out what their pain points are. It's laid out pretty well in "The Mom Test".
In the past I sort of just figured out what the smallest thing I could build is, and tried to get it in front of users. I think that's the route they send you down in "The Lean Startup".
Around this time last year I had a bunch of PDF bank statements to convert into CSV. I figured other people would have this problem so I created a SaaS application that converts PDF bank statements into CSV files.
https://bankstatementconverter.com/
I always try to validate my idea as soon as possible. Most of the time I start by asking on reddit if it is a good idea and if people would like to use it. I also have a trello board with multiple steps to test and validate my ideas. I speak about it in this podcast episode in case you are interested.
Hi Brandon 👋
Sharing my experience for Edith et Nous.
Two things we did:
Link: https://chromeextensionideas.substack.com/
I didn't try to validate the idea as I was trying to solve a problem.
I was constantly seeing indie hackers coming up with ideas instead of solving existing problems so decided to do something about it.
I'm solving that problem by serving existing problems with my newsletter that can be solved with a chrome extension.