How much would you pay to validate a business idea?
The general wisdom of product hacking says to generate an audience for a product with a landing page and email signup before actually building anything. This helps validate or invalidate an idea with less time and resources.
However, you still need to be able to come up with design assets to sell the idea and distribute it to the right channels to reach your target audience. This could lead to otherwise solid ideas being invalidated (or never being put out at all).
Let's say there's a platform that helped you put together these assets and put it in front of people in your target audience. For example, people would choose:
"Yes I would use it"
- I would use it for free
- I would use it for $X
"No, I wouldn't use it"
- I don't understand the idea
- I understand, but don't find it useful
- There's another app already doing this
People answering would be incentivized per reaction. Is there already a service like this? Are there any pitfalls to a platform like this? If not, how much would you pay to get a bunch of reactions to your app idea?
The problem with asking is that you get a lot of false positives. The real answer comes from asking people to pay for it.
Yup. And a service like that exists. It is called "kickstarter" or something like that.
What ToddInsights said. Asking this question is generally a pretty/very poor indicator of whether people would actually pay or not.
Would recommend giving 'The Mom Test' a read, if you haven't already
I think the Mom Test is great for identifying general pain points, but designing and building a solution that people are willing to not only use, but pay for is the next and (in my opinion) more difficult stage in the process.
So the described platform would come after an idea passes the Mom Test and the hacker wants to measure the potential profitability before pursuing.
Sure. My personal take is that identifying a great problem is much more difficult than people think, but yes, designing the solution (and surrounding business model is more challenging).
The reason I reference it though is that it outlines the principle that ToddInsights also outlines - that getting people to actually 'pay' for it (whether it's monetary or otherwise) is a much, much stronger signal than asking people whether that will or will not in the future.
So answers to this might be a signal, but I personally wouldn't put much (or any) faith in the answer.
I guess the key question is how much would someone pay? And you would need to invest reasonable time to design assets to sell it. The idea sounds good though
My lesson learned as an entrepreneur and now seed investor. Never trust feedback until there's an actual action from your customers. Only real numbers do the job.
Good advice, thanks.
What do you think of a service like Product Hunt Ship? On one hand you can gauge interest and start building a userbase early. But on the other, it's low commitment and doesn't get the action you talk about.
Not at all. Just an opinion.
Why would you bring up Product Hunt Ship. Have you ever published a Ship campaign? If you think the commitment / reaction is under your expectation, then maybe it's not the issue of Ship by the product itself.