How I'm going to pre-validate my new idea (and avoid losing hundreds of hours)

During the last 3 months, I worked on a new SaaS. I aimed to learn Bubble, so I didn't mind if the idea was great or not. It was all about building & learning with Bubble. But if I could make some easy money, why not, right?

It ended up this way: people were signing up, going through the onboarding, doing the first step of the product, and they all dropped here—almost 100 people.

It was not a bug; everything was working well.

Worst thing? None of them replied to my follow-up emails to know what was happening. I was speaking into the void.

It was a failure. But no harsh feelings: I stopped everything and I moved on.

The great thing is I'm now very comfortable building with Bubble.

It leads us to today's topic. On Friday, I had a new idea. I told myself I was going to do it differently this time.

So I spent the day registering a domain name, building a landing page, adding a logo, creating some design materials, etc... You know the drill, right?

I got the fuck out of localhost and pushed everything online yesterday.

Now, I'm setting up the last things: thank you page for the waiting list, a marketing plan, analytics, etc...

From there, I'm only going to do marketing until it's worth it.

The goal is to validate the idea before spending more time.

I will do that 2 ways:

• Let the data talk: Any conversion rate less than 10% > I let it go. I actually aim to 20% sign up after landing page improvements.
• Let the emotions talk: momentum is also a feeling. When you're working on a cool idea, you feel it. People are sharing great things with you.

We'll see how it goes.

Project: https://www.candideai.com

Wish me luck :)