Organic idea validation through community conversations

Hey Indie Hackers! I just wrote up my first blog and newsletter post about how I'm validating an idea for the creator economy. I wanted to crosspost it here in the hopes that someone might find it useful.

You can read it in full here: https://wantrapreneur.io/organic-idea-validation/.

---

Before validating an idea

Prior to ideating and solutioning, you want to have a target audience in mind. People who have problems. People who would be interested in your solutions to their problems. This 'audience first' approach is described at length by many other writers and successful entrepreneurs in the space. One example is Arvid Kahl. He has a lot of great written content you should check out, but this post in particular. The audience comes first.,your products%2C they come second.) describes the audience first approach.

The audience comes first. Their needs come first. Their problems come first. Your idea, your solutions, your products, they come second.

I'm focused on "the creator economy". I have a few ideas about problems they could be facing. My goal is to uncover their painful truths.

Validating our idea — wildfire.so

Let's make this concrete. I've talked to about 10 people so far for wildfire.so using Reddit for cold outreach. I scheduled a very informative call with a potential customer who is the perfect member of my target audience: a successful creator with real revenue, thousands of followers, and a real understanding for the content business. How?

A tool called Gummysearch. It lets you find communities where people are talking about your big ideas. You can then interact with this community organically, and have the exact conversations we've been discussing. Below, I will describe how I've been using Gummysearch to validate an idea.

Creating an audience

You know Gummysearch is the perfect tool for talking to your target audience, when the first thing you do in Gummysearch is just that: create an audience. Once you create an account and get setup, add your first audience. For wildfire.so, we're targeting writers—specifically newsletter writers.
Creating the audience and naming it "Writers"Searching for communities that are a part of the audience

Searching

After we've done that, Gummysearch has this great interface for exploring that audience. You can explore "Hot Discussions", "Top Content", and my personal favorite, "Solution Requests". Pretty great for an entrepreneur looking to build a SaaS product as a solution.
Gummysearch builtin features
The builtin feature suggestions are great, but you can also search for specific keywords. To validate my idea, I've been searching for things like "newsletter", "crossposting", "audience growth", "tools", "software", etc.

After searching, you can find specific posts and comments mentioning those topics in the communities related to your target audience.
Results for "newsletter" in my 'Writers' audience
I'll click on any of these that look particularly promising. Then, I will either reach out to the user who posted it on reddit via a direct message, or I will comment on the post.

A brief note on the "organic" word I keep using

I've used the word "organic" a few times, and I wanted to be clear about how I define that. This process can sometimes seem a little salesy, skeevy, or schemey. At least, that is how it makes me feel sometimes. So to avoid that feeling, I approach this with a mindset of genuinely trying to add value to this audience. That is ultimately what I am trying to do. I'm trying to add value to the creator economy. More specifically, I'm trying to add the most value to the creator economy, by adding leverage to the creator economy, through software tooling provided to smaller creators.

Keeping this perspective in mind, when you reach out to people within your target audience, you should attempt to truly solve their problems. Sometimes that means you're not even mentioning your product. The other day I spent an hour providing feedback to a writer in the community on her short science fiction story. That probably didn't go a long way towards helping me validate my idea, but it helps me understand the audience. You have to understand the audience if you're going to build for them. I'm not in it to sell my product, or to subtly drop a link to wildfire.so. I'm in it to help people by solving their problems.

Reaching out

If I find a post, I will try to comment on it, either answering the person's question, providing feedback, helping them solve their problem. One person was asking how to start a newsletter, so I shared what little I knew about that process in a long reply, detailing out actions they could take, sharing resources I knew would be helpful.

If I find a user to reach out to, I'll request a direct chat with a typical cold outreach message. Please do not use my template, it's probably horrible. It's probably gotten about 40% reply rate so far, but the sample size is only about 15. There are people much more informed about cold outreach that you should probably check out.

Anyway, here's what I typically send:

Hey! Saw your post on <subreddit> mentioning <something>. I wanted to connect because I'm trying to understand content creators and the creator economy.

Are you currently using any tools to crosspost your newsletter across socials? I am building something that might be useful, but I wanted to connect with creators like yourself to validate that.

I'd love to connect and chat about any problems you're facing with your content creation. I have product and tech experience, so may be able to offer something of value!

Looking forward to hearing from you.

After establishing a dialog, either on the post or in direct messages, I will eventually mention [wildfire.so and share the link to get their thoughts. Otherwise, I'll just describe the idea, and see what they think.

Ideally, I setup a phone call with the person. You will get much more useful information out of a call than a chat. Approach these calls taking as many ideas from The Mom Test as possible.

Conclusion

That's how I have been validating an idea in the creator economy space. I'm obsessed with the idea of creating leverage for small creators. The same way that Stripe aims to "increase the GDP of the internet", I want to increase the GDP of the creator economy.

My steps for "organic idea validation" are as follows:

1. Pick and research a market and audience
2. Formulate a hypothesis about that market: "It is really difficult for people to share their newsletter across all of their social media channels". Bonus points if it is clear how a software product might take advantage of this hypothesis.
3. Find places where your audience is hanging out: Reddit (made easy with Gummysearch), Twitter, forums, etc.
4. Talk to your audience; have meaningful conversations; add value with your unique perspective and experience; do not sell
5. Form genuine relationships and ask for genuine feedback on your hypothesis and related ideas
6. Double down or pivot; rinse and repeat

I hope you found this valuable. If so, please subscribe!

Subscribe For Updates

If not, please tweet me or email me. I welcome your feedback.

Other Reading

You should definitely check out most of the content produced by Arvid Kahl and Rob Fitzpatrick. Especially The Embedded Entrepreneur and The Mom Test. I'd put money on 99% of people reading this having heard of both already, but hey, you never know.