How I got early product validation from a Facebook group

Hey Indie Hackers-- I wanted to share something I learned that might help some of you out in the early validation phase of your idea or MVP. I had a lot of success by employing this strategy with mlrequest.

The problem. you've built an MVP, you've got a landing page, now all you need is traction. Unfortunately, you won't get traction without solving a problem that people are willing to pay for. Validating and iterating on your idea is key. Time to start cold emailing hundreds of people and hope for a response from a fraction of them...

Or not. I think the sentiment "do things that don't scale" is generally true but certainly not the most efficient. In the beginning stages of your product, when you can successfully do things that do scale, you should do them.

You know the general type of customer you're targeting, so why not leverage all those wonderful communities on the internet that have thousands of them? Oh, right... because all of them say no self/product promotion, it will be considered as spam, and you will be banned from the group.

The solution. It's all in how you frame what you're asking. You can't show up to one of these communities and say "Look at my product X! Here's my website, what do you think?" It looks like spam and the mods won't be happy. Instead, derive a more meaningful question that will help you get to the same place. Develop a question that adds to the discussion of the group, not for your own personal needs. When I did this with mlrequest, I got awesome feedback from dozens of people (literally) within 2 minutes.

Here is an example of how to do this. Say you are a new yoyo company, and you've developed the fastest spinning yoyo in the world. You think people who yoyo will love this, but you need to validate that before you start putting more time, effort, and money into the idea. You join the Facebook group "Sicknasty Yoyo Bois" and instead of forwarding them to your landing page, you create a poll that says "What do you like most about your yoyo? A) It's super fast, B) It's super cool looking, C) It was the cheapest one I could find". Group members will respond to the poll and leave comments with their thoughts. This allows you to get targeted feedback from a large group of people and actually add to the conversation of this group. You didn't spam a link or ask people to sign up, you simply asked a question that other people would probably be happy to answer without thinking twice about it.

You may have found from the poll that nobody cares how fast their yoyo is, and that most people just want a cool looking yoyo. Or, it could be that you hit the nail on the head on the first try and your blazing-fast yoyo is the bee's knees. Either way, you are now equipped with more information to further refine your product.

This strategy isn't going to get you product market fit, but it will help you weed out ideas that aren't going to get you very far. You can take this information and pivot, or further refine the product by talking to individual customers to really understand their needs.