How to test an idea for $12.17

Hi IH,

If you follow Levels on Twitter you may be a fan of the solofounder movement; fast deployment, testing and iteration is key.

It feels like every year new trends are popping up and new technologies are becoming useful.

I love to test ideas. Very similar to levels my hit rates tend to be low but the ones that hit are impactful on my life. Therefore, it's super important to test things, fail and move on as quickly as possible.

Let's move on to the first step, i'm assuming you have your niche you would like to target already worked out. For the sake of this let's look at AI.

How to test an idea for $12.17

First thing you want to do is market research. Get a free trial for Moz. I love ahrefs but Moz offers a free 1 month trial, so let's use that.

You want to find a keyword with decent traffic and low keyword difficulty. By decent traffic i'm looking for keywords around 1,000 clicks per month to start and looking for a keyword difficulty less than 10. A keyword difficulty less than 10 means you're targeting a keyword that shouldn't be that hard to compete with. Not many big companies are targeting it which makes it a great prospect for us.

Typically websites need a high domain authority and lots of backlinks to compete for keywords >10. So let's stick to easy peasy keywords.

Domain search

Next thing we want to do is go to buy a domain. If you have never done this before use godaddy, it's slightly more expensive but the UI is super simple to use.

Find a domain that is 2 words or less. Make sure the keyword is at the beginning of the title. So if you're targeting the website themes niche, consider buying themestars, themehero etc.

Only buy it for 1 year. Dotcoms are preferred.

Buy one you like

Landing page

Next we need a landing page.

Here I created a landing page in Nextjs that you can use for free on Github. Feel free to fork it.

https://github.com/ericlam1114/themegoliath

It's a landing page with sheets.best integration.

Sheets.best is a website that simplifies the Google Sheets API. Meaning you create a free account on Sheets.best and put in your URL for the Google Sheet you want to use, Sheets.best will give you a new link to use in your website code so that when a user signs up to the landing page, it automatically gets logged in google sheets.

This is 100% free and you can change the code to fit your usecase in a few minutes.

Deployment

Deploy to Netlify, it's free. You can use Vercel if you want instead, but they're basically the same.

They both integrate with github so you can have your landing page uploaded in a few minutes.

Next change the nameservers in your Netlify or Vercel deployment to link to the godaddy nameservers for your new domain.

Your site should now be up.

Promo

Now is the real test. Test for the first week should always be free in my opinion.

I will post on Reddit, Indiehackers and the like to see how much interest there is in my concept.

If there's none that's not a good sign. If I want to make one last push i'll run google ads for a few days to see if I can get any signups to the landing.

If no, I bail on the idea cutting my losses at $12.17.

If yes, then I consider how to bring in other free promotional tactics as paid promotion can drain you if you rely on it 100%.

If you are getting paid traffic but having trouble in forums consider doubling down on SEO for a few months writing articles for long tail keywords in your niche.

We want to be sure when it's going to be worth going heavy with $$$

How you know if you have product market fit

You will know when you have it. If only a few people are signing up when you run google ads that's not good.

Meaning for $20/day you should have more than 5-10 signups.

If you post your product on a free forum or page like indiehackers or reddit and get some signups, that's a great sign.

My website vocalpresets.com got most of it's traffic by going #1 on reddit 4x for it's niche. I got tons of traffic that way.

Hopefully this helps someone! let me know if you have any questions below.

PS: Feel free to check out my newsletter @ themegoliath.com top site themes for personal brands straight to your inbox once a week.