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17 Comments

How to validate your idea without building a whole site?

Hey Guys!

I have an idea that I would like to test, but I do not want to spend weeks building a product later to find out it was not worth the time or effort. I was thinking of building one free feature/page of the site and host it for free on a GitHub domain and post it in some forums related to the site and see if people are interested.

Or should I make a landing page showing what the product would like and how it would work in a video and connect it too an email list.

I'm a wee bit stuck on what to do?

Thanks x

  1. 3

    I'd say both things combined would be interesting: a simple landing page, explaining what the product is about, with the ability to use the one feature you could build now as a teaser.

    This way you're not only talking about what's gonna be there, but actually showing a bit of it.

    Then a form to gather emails from those interested. If you gather enough, that's your validation.

    Best of luck!

  2. 2

    Just use umso.co to show the product.

    You can build it in less than 30 min! Or build an image and post it on Reddit...

  3. 1

    Two years on, how would you do this differently? Are there 'newer' tools out there that would help you validate more effectively?

  4. 1

    I think this might come in handy https://areyouinterested.co/
    Setup a page and get your idea validated first

  5. 1

    You need to learn the entrepreneurs superpower - Idea Validation. Don't build anything until you know it's feasible, viable and desirable. It's the desirable part that most get stuck on and what you are exploring here. Don't do surveys, people tell you what they think you want to hear. You want to collect data on customer behaviour. This can range from people joining a waitlist to pre-orders.

  6. 1

    Search for the concept "Sales Safari". It might help you find people and soft-validate.

  7. 1

    Depending upon what problem your product solves, it might be possible to validate it without even building anything e.g. Say if it's data you're ultimately selling, then get your data directly to those whom you think would need it through any available means could tell you if they really want that data and thereby your product.

    I've covered this in more detail here - Myths about Minimum Viable Product.

  8. 1

    It depends on the idea- is it something small enough to be validated this way?
    If the stuff that makes it amazing can't be grasped in a basic landing page then you can build a nocode MVP to capture a bit more, like we did at Schema.eco
    Things like speed, community, and other important moats can't always be understood by someone in a couple static images.

  9. 1

    @WalloDev everyone in the comments have listed some really great ideas on how you can validate this business idea yourself.

    My business partner and I actually run a market validation business helping people like yourself validate business ideas. If you want to learn a bit more about it i'd be more than happy to talk you through our process and how we could help.

    Cheers!

  10. 1

    Search for the concept "Sales Safari". It might help you find people and soft-validate.

  11. 1

    Hello, we're also currently in the stage of validating our idea and we found this resource to be really helpful as this is now the model our team is following to do daily validation experiments to test our assumptions: https://cobuildlab.com/blog/validating-your-idea-the-first-step-to-create-your-startup/

    It contains examples of what things you can do to validate too.

    Hope this helps!

  12. 1
    1. You could talk to certain groups on reddit about this and ask their opinion

    2. Could use a tool like surveywave, areyouinterested etc

  13. 1

    @WalloDev A great way to see if people might find it useful is by directly having focus groups and interviewing your potential customers.

    A friend of mine is currently working on a "health+tech" startup idea. He recently started lining up interview calls with doctors of all sorts. Now he has been collecting decent data to go further with the product development.

    The same way, you can begin this process by simply answering these questions -

    1. Who is my target audience? Are there any behavior patterns common in them?
    2. Where can i find these people? Do they hang out in communities or groups?
    3. What might be the questions in their mind related to my product?
    4. How would they critic my product? Are there any pitfalls I need to consider?

    While these are not all the questions, just giving them to you for a jump start. You can brainstorm as per your product and audience.

    Hope that helps you!

  14. 1

    Hi there are various ways you can do that.

    Some examples include:

    1. Samuel Briskar created a video using basic wireframes to get 400 signups and 5 initial sales of a product that is yet to exist.

    2. Kettle & Fire's founder Justin Mares validated his idea with just a landing page and Bing Ads.

    3. Joe Benjamin got his first sale just by replying to a tweet.

    I've written a post on this here.

    I've curated, analyzed & summarized over 120 founders' interviews on the strategies they've used to grow their businesses into a database here. Feel free to check it out at www.Growthhunt.Co

    1. 1

      This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

  15. 1

    Very conceptual and crude HTML mockup and free hosting seems to be the most effective and cheap (both energy-wise and financially) solution

  16. 1

    Create landing page, option to request demo with email list. Run the $100 ads on that landing page and you will get to know if people are interested on some sort of stuff or not.

    If you are building something that is not already available there is high chance this will not work. In that case, it best to build the prototype and talk to users.

  17. 1

    This comment was deleted 2 years ago.

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