Pre-product interviews are hurting you... here's why

I’ve had 3 profitable online businesses, exited/sold 1.

When I was first starting 7 years ago I consumed a ton of content online, read all the business books and did everything I could to wrap my head around starting an online business.

One thing that I often came across was this idea that it’s important to interview prospective buyers prior to launching your product. The idea was to find out if they would buy your product/service and that it filled a need for them.

I’ve learned that although this may have been the go-to strategy back in the day, the amount of data and tools now available for free make it an obsolete strategy.

Too Much Bias

I learned that this strategy is ineffective because individuals have a ton of bias and often want to be heard.

In other words, if you ask someone “what do you think of this landing page?” they will often find things to point out that are “wrong”. I learned this firsthand with my newsletter Explodingideas.co.

Basically when asking my prospective audience what they thought about the landing page I often heard “bad value proposition”, “poor design”, “associating with ex employees from major companies is not convincing”. This was extremely interesting because I exposed the landing page to another segment of my prospective audience without prompting them for their feedback and I got a 60% signup rate. Meaning for every 10 people that went to the website, 6 signed up for the newsletter (this is considered high).

What people “say” and what they “do” are very different things.

Here’s the new model to launch an online business effectively…

The New Strategy

Instead of asking for user feedback prior to launching, set up a landing page fully branded with either a signup form or a stripe checkout form.

Post the landing page where your audience hangs out. If you get signups or purchases you have validation. If you don’t get any of that validation in 3 days and you are certain people are coming to your website, you posted in the right place, and they’re just not engaging, it’s likely that you don’t have product market fit and the market just told you what it thought about your product.

This can be done for under $50 and is a way simpler and bulletproof process to test your idea. Using tools like Google Analytics and groups like Facebook groups to post you can tell if your idea has momentum pretty easily.

The landscape has changed, therefore new tactics and strategies become more effective than what people used in the past. It’s important to have a bias towards action, meaning more doing and less talking. It’s pretty amazing today you can test 4 business ideas in 1 month, find one that works and then bootstrap it to profitability using a technique like this. I have used this method to bootstrap every profitable project I've built.

Good luck. Hope this helps someone.