How fast should you move after validation?
Do you have any opinion or experience about it? I know it depends, but I'm all ears to hear (read) some stories, have a discussion about this topic.
I'm a father of a 20 months old girl with a full-time senior backend developer job. I mostly don't have spare time, but I'm tired of saying I don't, I'm tired of saying I'll start a business next year, I will execute on my idea in Q1 of 2023, but I'm a bit afraid, if the validation would go beyond expectation, let's say lots of people subscribed to the email list, I won't be able to ship the product in a few weeks. I also don't want to postpone validation just because I'm not yet done with the MVP. What would you do? It's hard to find the optimal point of building a pre-MVP and doing a pre-validation. Should I just give it a go and send an update each week? Or make a closed group in Slack in the very beginning asking people to join if they want to be early bird alfa testers? (this way I wouldn't spam their e-mail inbox with update letters that are not about the release date) Obviously we don't want to loose their interest along the way, so either we need mind tricks to keep their attention or build it very fast.
Maybe the real question really is the MVP itself. It should be as small as it can and as much quality as it can, nothing more features. If people can already click and use it, they probably will more patient with the additional features coming in their own phase, aren't they?
So that's why it's interesting to ask, how fast should we move after the idea is clearly validated?
I would say validation isn't to acquire customers, it's to build your own conviction - so you have to have an idea of what numbers would convince you that this is worth pursuing. If you run idea validation, you'll have de-risked further steps regardless of when you choose to pursue it (barring competition or market changes)
Agree on this! consider validation as a separate step and assume that you will have to earn the customers again from scratch when you go live. This will prepare you for the worst case so that you can execute it correctly.
What a good point of view! Thanks!
If you can get people to sign up during validation, you’ll be able to get people to sign up later.
Even if every person from your waitlist drops off (unlikely), having that validation will be invaluable.
True. I'm not afraid of competition, that's most of the time boosts the market, I was a bit afraid of my own expectations how fast I can move in these circumstances. Recently I've read a post about a soldier who has made his SaaS business while he was deployed, have 45 minutes a day for it, so I shouldn't be afraid, but do it systematically every single day instead.
You've got this. 👊
I would say move as fast as you can after validation. However, if you are able to successfully validate the product, if it takes you a long time to release you will still be able to find new customer and will not have wasted your time since it was pre-validated! hope this helps :)
Once you feel ready and validate the basic need, I would say execute as fast as you can
@norbertdragan
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