How do you validate your ideas before kick off?

If it's a small niche product with not too much competition, create a page on your website about it, describing it as if you're selling a potential customer on it. Then at the bottom, add a form with a header above that says:
"We're currently evaluating whether to make this or not. If this sounds interesting to you, would you be willing to buy/signup for this product?" You can even add a voting question below that asking how interested they are on a 1 to 10 level.

Let this page bake for about 1-3 months to be indexed by search engines and then check your analytics to see how the traffic for that post compared to the rest of your traffic.

If your traffic starts going up due to this page and if you get a fair amount of submissions, you may have something.

Again, if your product/service idea is niche enough, this experiment does not require that you run ads to this page. The good thing about this is that if you decide it's worth building, you already have a head start and can convert this page into a full-on sales page with actual ranking organic traffic and even a list of interested customers who you can launch to who have filled out your form.

As an indie hacker, I've experimented with building complex solutions, but over time, I've realized that it's not a productive approach. Instead, I recommend focusing on creating products quickly by asking oneself, "How can I build this in a day or two?" It's also essential to consider building a simple way to monetize the product and validating the business model.

If you're doing something consumer, running some Meta ad tests for a few $100 can be great to validate an idea before building. Plus, if it works out, you've basically built a marketing funnel out the gate.

Stage 1: Use some stock photography and run some ads with a clear and simple value proposition (no pricing). Can you actually get people to click on the ad and do you get SWAG reasonable click-rates / CPCs for the range of pricing your product can support?

Possibly test 2-3 value propositions/copy, and for each value proposition have 2-3 different visual ad versions. Budget $20-$40 per value prop and run the campaign for a week.

Stage 2: Let's say you get some people click at "OK" rates. Build some landing pages (e.g. I found Unbounce, while stupid expensive, to be helpful for moving quick) following good practices and a CTA that makes sense for your product. Can you actually get people to hit that "buy"/ "subscribe" /etc. CTA button at a reasonable cost?

If people hit the CTA, just have it load up a form where they can enter their email to join your waitlist.

Stage 3 / combine with stage 2: It's a bit of legwork, but make a bunch of copies of the landing page and test and different price points. You'll want a separate email sink for each price point.

Again, maybe just $20-$40 bucks per value prop per price point and run the campaign for a week.

Also, don't optimize audience. Just do everyone of most (reasonable) ages. You'll be able to break-down and analyze results across age, gender, device and a few other factors later.

You goal isn't to get a killer CTR/CPC/CAC etc. -- that's stuff an be optimized later. You just want to see if you're in a reasonable ballpark that works for your business model and pricing, and understand the demos of who is clicking.

All-in-all, you're looking at $300-$500 and 3-4 weeks to see if a product is worth building and have an immediate potential marketing funnel. Not a bad investment in my book.

Validating the ideas also involves validating 'your reach'. It's different to different customers based on your skill set, reach, existing audience etc.

I wrote about it in Zero To Founder. But here are some quick pointers.

• Start with a landing page
• Build the waitlist by talking about your product in various forums like IH, Reddit, Facebook groups.
• You can share with audience about how your brainstormed your idea, finalized domain, show how you plan to build product and drive traction by building in public
• Allocate more more more time for marketing your landing page
• If possible, talk 1:1 with your waitlist users and see what they were looking for. (Read The Moms Test book)
• If still no luck, try with some ads and stick to less than $100 budget and improve your waitlist.

I recommend watching this video by Y Combinator