📈 How I am doing smoke tests, and test the viability of an idea 💨
Hello everybody 👋, I have 3 ideas to test and I have decided to launch one of them
Why am I doing a smoke test?
I want to test them and see the market willingness to use it and our unique value proposition. I want to have a really strong competitive advantage over them and also I want to reduce my risk of failure. Previously I launched a failed startup and I don't want to do the same mistakes.
How am I doing it?
- Search possible ideas
- See the markets with more potential and the ideas we like more
- Select the ideas that fit better with my cofounders and my abilities and knowledge
- Select 3 finalists ideas, and create a landing page for each one
- Insert Google Analytics and a typeform in each landing to analyze data and results
- Promote the ideas
- Interview possible customers
- Select the winner idea
The ideas are:
- The first is a teamwork software ⌛ (It would be like an Asana + Zoom with steroids)
- The second is one that will create a personalized diet and exercise routine for each one, adapting to your needs and changes 🔵
- The last one would be a web and app that would create us learning plans with personalized content to us (what we want to study and how!) We could learn every day for the rest of our lives, what we want in each moment ✅
This is my process for it, which is your process to select an idea to develop? How do you do smoke tests?
If you think one of them would be interesting help us joining us and we will launch it.
Thank you so much for the support
Number one is incresibily interesting on paper but the probability that a small team can build a better product than Asana and Zoom combined is close to zero.
Number two is problematic. Diet is a serious matter and the wrong diet can cause real damage to health. I doubt it that an app can give you a good personalized diet. Leaving out ethical concerns, you are exposing yourself to lawsuits because you won't be able to deliver on your promise and you risk causing serious damage.
I really like number three and would like to learn more about it.
thanks for the interest, and the sincere feedback
Awesome for you to share your execution on idea validation.
If you haven't already, check out Tandem.chat in reference to your idea 1, they went through YC this year and my remote team uses them. It will give you further insight of what other folks in that space are doing.
We are the wrong people to talk to. You need to identify 10 people who should use your idea, and talk to them. What do they need? What do they want? What is hard?
Thanks for the feedback Josh. I wanted to share my experience and also at the same time show the ideas, I know here it can be a bit biased but with the people that left the email I am contacting them to do more user research.
totally love the idea of sharing the experience etc. Just wanted to remind you that all of indiehackers can say this or that idea is good, but we probably are not all your customers. Good luck!
I think the first one is interesting but extremely hard to carry out. Marketing should be pretty hard against Asana + Trello + Zoom + ... . But also the programming part could be challenging because of video conferencing.
I do not like the other two ideas, but of course this is just a personal taste.
I would like to know, how do you get people to visit your landing page? SEM, SEO, content marketing, ...? What do you think works best?
EDIT: I just noticed that 3) could be pretty interesting. It completely depends on your headline. I have read "something something MBA" and thought "ugghhh borring". But then I re-read your description that it could be about any topic. So 3) completely depends on your positioning here, to find the right niche.
Thanks for the feedback! I appreciate it.
To get traffic to my landing page this is what I do:
This is just to get the initial feedback on the projects and see the people that is interested. Once I chose a project I start to do social media, press & content marketing also.
For me what it works better in the initial phase is the newsletter and share it in groups that you engage a lot with people. If you can appear in some newsletters is the best initial channel for me.
Hope it helps
Thanks for the detailed answer. This helps a lot.
Great ideas!
Thank you!
i like #3 :)
Thank you so much for the feedback! If you can click on the CTA of the website it will help us to count it and decide better.