Hey hackers! š
This community has been one of my go-to resources on #IdeaValidation over the years. I wanted to share a system Iāve been working on that has enabled me to keep my finger on the pulse of the early-stage business ideas I have been working on: Protolyst.
I'm hoping that parts of this approach may be useful to pull into your personal idea validation workflows.
Like any good Indie Hacker, when validating a new business idea, I try to direct as much of my attention as possible into talking to potential customers and users.
What I kept finding though, particularly when managing multiple ideas in parallel, was that I struggled to accurately recall the important insights or golden nuggets from so many interactions. If I ever looked back through my notes I could almost never find the key idea I was looking for. So I started to build a system to keep track of who I was talking to, where and when I spoke to them, the notes from the conversation, and importantly to jot down the key ideas I learned from each meeting or article I read.
The problem I found was that these notes ended up everywhere! Iād open notes app, Google docs, Iād bookmark pages, or just scribble on the back of an envelope! This made the process of consolidating those ideas a huge effort. I started to use things like Zettlekasten, but found myself spending a huge amount of time in administration and organisation of the data and little time actually synthesising much from it.
And so (after some Idea validation of my own) I started to develop an in-house way of keeping track of these ideas, first built out of bits of hacked together script running on a SquareSpace page (the MVP). Then when clients started asking for access to it, I developed it into a standalone version that became Protolyst.
With Protolyst I tried to pioneer a knowledge-centric approach to data, rather than our traditional document-centric approaches. Iād observed that Iād very rarely take the time to find a deeply foldered document to reference an idea, usually Iād just do my best to remember it and hope I had it right.
What if instead, great ideas and insights were liberated from the confines of a page? I started to design an interconnected architecture built around your core āatomsā of data. āļø
Each atom can be tagged in a page with custom attributes, like market size, customer pain, or feature request. I can easily collect, collate, and sort to instantly pool evidence from across 100ās of customer conversations.
I found that if I identified pain points accurately and captured these insights across my conversations, over time, patterns emerged that revealed the most influential problems people faced. I found three key factors to making these patterns emerge more reliably and quickly:
"Just one more feature" is an all too familiar phrase. If youāre like me, youāve probably been guilty of creating features interesting to yourself rather than features that genuinely provide unique value to your users. Today, I make sure to use Protolyst to be able to evidence every item in my action list. Business ideas can be evidenced not just during the ideation phase, but also during the development phase.
Linking your features and ideas to evidence directly from your customer conversations before you even touch a line of code empowers you to stay true to your vision and build what you know customers will love. It helps prioritise tasks that provide the most value and avoid those ānice to havesā.
Once you have a firm understanding of what a potential solution to your users' problems may look like, start building, but then test, test and test again. Collect feedback, and connect it to refinements or additional features still required.
Use your knowledge-base to outline and develop an effective MVP that, first and foremost, evaluates your product-market fit.
No matter how thorough we are with our idea validation, the confidence to take the leap and move forward with any startup idea, stems from us, the entrepreneurs. However, I have found that this leap is much easier when I am well researched and my decision is backed by robust data.
If you're interested in trying Protolyst to manage your own knowledge-base, join the Beta! Iāve put together a template called āProduct Managementā that you can select on sign up. I'll see you there!