I Validated a Product by Getting 3K Users in 3 Weeks. Here's how you can too.

Hey everyone,

Just wanted to share my recent experience with a side project I created which ended up getting 3,000 users in three weeks. I'll outline the steps I took to validate it with the hope it might help others looking to validate their own projects.

Idea: I started by identifying a problem many solopreneurs (including myself) have - finding viable ideas. My solution was to create a simple tool that generates Micro SaaS ideas based on a users niche. So first things first, find a problem you want to solve.

Development: I kept the tool really simple and user-friendly. All it required was users to input a niche to generate ideas. If a user didn't have a niche in mind then they could generate a random one. The key here is to make it simple for the user to use. All I needed was a basic landing page with a text box to enter your niche, a button to generate a random niche if you didn’t have one in mind and a button to generate the Micro Saas ideas. Then have a page to show the results. I used an next.js boilerplate called ShipFast for development.

Launch Strategy: I then shared it on platforms like hackernews.com, and relevant subreddits and added it to some directories to get Google to start knowing that the website existed. Users are still coming in from all of these websites after 3 weeks so the point here is get the word out there. Nobody will know about your product until you start talking about it.

Feedback Loop: This was the key. I actively asked people for feedback. Some of it was great, some not so great but one of the main bits of feedback I got was that the ideas weren’t validated and because of that people asked what was the point. The point at the beginning was to provide a free tool to get people thinking about product ideas and generally get the creative juices flowing but the feedback led me to pivot (more on that below). The key here is to actually ask for feedback. Some of it will be good, some of it will be bad but it will be all valuable. Asking for feedback get’s people talking and people will start to use your product in order to give you feedback.

Analytics: I monitored user interaction through simple analytics (I use plausible for this), which helped me understand how users were interacting with the tool and where they were dropping off. This helped me to know that the tool was being used everyday and it was somewhat useful so I would definitely recommend some sort of analytics to track this. Google Analytics is free but very convoluted. I opted for Plausible because it shows me all the information I need without complicating it.

So all in all if you keep it simple in the beginning, get the word out there, ask for feedback and monitor how people use your product you should have a good idea of how viable your product is.

What now

So the tool (which can be found here) has been doing quite well but I’ve decided to update it to add more value based on the feedback I got. Now if you generate ideas you will be able to choose an idea and check the SEO potential of it. You’ll see keywords suggestions, the keyword difficulty for them (how hard it is to rank on google for it) and the average search volume per month. If the SEO Potential is good then the idea has potential for organic search results meaning you could build the product, optimize it for SEO based on the info you’ve just gotten and then watch the customers come in without you having to do too much marketing.

Hope this can be of help to some people.