How to find and validate your market?
Hey hey, folks! I'm finally starting to try my bootstrapping dream, after spending the whole week learning a lot from the "Start Small, Stay Small" and "The Epic Guide to Bootstrapping a SaaS Startup from Scratch".
I guess the first lesson was to scratch all my ideas and inventions since it's a risky area and I'm not a funded startup that can afford it.
Now that I have a list of all my areas of interest, I'm trying to find keywords and niches on MOZ to see what I should build. My process so far is to find things that are searched around 1k~5k/mo and have a difficulty lower than 35.
Problem is that I'm not being able to find anything, all of my interests bring me to things that are very competitive, probably not niched. And if I try to niche it down, I get things that have only 10-50 searchs monthly.
Do you guys have any tips and guidance for me? My next step would be to create a landing page to validate my idea, but I'm kinda stuck trying to figure out what to build first.
Try finding the idea outside your own person, but within your circles. See what problems friends or families seem to have. If you want to solve a problem for a lot of future customers, you have to solve it for one person first. It's best if that person is either you yourself, your partner or a friend. That will give you a lot of initial insight, and it validates the need for the product a lot. If there is no pain, there is no gain, so to speak. You can gauge the intensity of the pain and the desire to have people pay money for it quickly if that person is someone you know.
I would be careful to build something just because people search for it online. You will want to develop a passion for the problem first. If you're not passionate, it will be an uphill battle.
Try this for your first step: ask people you know (who work in a different industry than yours) which problem they have to solve over and over and are using Excel / Google Sheets for. I have yet to find a friend or family member who does not use a spreadsheet for something. Go from there :)
Thanks for the answer, my friend!
Yes, that's exactly what I did... I drew my network of friends and family interests and businesses, trying to find something that I can build.
Problem is that I don't know how to validate them according to what I read from the above sources. Both of them suggest validating the market by the number of potential customers and ease of the sales channel - hence analyzing Google keywords and ranking difficulty.
Honestly, I didn't find this as exciting as I imagined, but I believe they went through this path already and makes sense.
Yeah, I think those tools are rather "cold" and "unempathetic" when it comes to determining if this is a really strong pain or just an inconvenience.
I think if you found an idea you can be passionate about, reach out to real people. The numbers will be useful later on, but make sure you talk to someone who is affected and see if the pain they feel is strong enough to eventually give you their credit card number.
Validation is hard. I would suggest listening to https://www.brightandearlypodcast.com/18 with @robfitz, read his book and then approach people with good questions.