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12 Comments

Product Hunt For Ideas

It's hard to get enough feedback to validate the ideas. Even with 30,000+ IndieHackers a lot of ideas only get a few comments. So I came up with an idea to solve that called 100 First Fans.

It's like Product Hunt for ideas.

I spent an hour building a super simple landing page:
https://ideastrider.com/100-first-fans/

Let me know if I should build this idea!

  1. 2

    Hey @Bobbyfin - this idea pops up every two weeks on here. For example, here's the same idea from two weeks ago.

    This tends to be the solution that loads of people jump to when it comes to validating ideas, but in my opinion this would be a really terrible way to find a good startup idea. The root of a good startup is in finding a burning pain point within a clear niche, not trying to get a generic, unsegmented audience to give you the most upvotes on a snappy slogan. You're better off using a discovery framework like Customer Problem Stack Ranking to validate that you're solving a worthy problem than trying to out-compete a bunch of tweetable ideas.

    1. 1

      Dang, you weren't kidding. The idea is posted pretty often... well great minds think alike and so do fools :)

      To your point, the hardest part would be building a large enough user base to have all the nitches people need to focus on. I'll need to read the customer problem stack. Thanks for the feedback!

      Still, if enough people in IH and entrepreneurs, in general, are having a hard time reaching out to get feedback in their respective nitches then there must be something worth solving.

      1. 1

        Absolutely, I see the problem ALL the time for people struggling the find the right group for validation. That's most definitely a big problem. The polling, voting on idea snippets and "would you pay for this" questions are all seen as a poor ways to validate an idea though, so I'd steer well clear of all that (if you're not sure why, the book The Mom Test is a great short read on this topic!)

      1. 1

        Sorry, forgot about that. If you tell me your email address I'll invite you.

  2. 1

    I think the idea is interesting, but I need more details to know how you will make it work. Who will be the 100 "fans" who will get to vote and comment on an idea? And how do you make sure these fans will be committed to their reviewing task?

    1. 1

      So your 100 "fans" would be people in your desired nitch. Think about Facebook/LinkedIn ads where you can select demographic/psychographic areas you want to focus on like yoga teachers in TX who like rock collecting.

      To motivate people I thought two ways:

      1. Show them relevant ideas to their interest
      2. Pay them a small amount

      Perhaps later on I can do a Groupon or Honey model where users can get bigger discounts when the product/service is actually ready.

      Still, we'd need a large pool of people because I'm guessing only 10% of our users will actually be active after a couple of trys.

  3. 1

    I'm not a native English speaker, but the usage of the word "fans" sets me off ... I always thought "fans" meant "strong supporters", looks like you should be calling them "reviewers" instead. I'm paying for someone to evaluate the idea, not to be a blind supporter of it , like the fake twitter or instagram followers some people buy.
    it's pretty confusing, tbh. Also, a bit pricey, isn't it? Why should I pay 120$ dollars when I could get reviews for free on reddit or here? :/

    1. 1

      So I came up with the idea because of a lack of feedback on my ideas here on Indie Hackers. No feedback doesn't mean it's a bad idea and I think a lot of people get discouraged when they don't get enough feedback.

      The wording can be changed easily. Same for pricing. Thanks for your feedback!

      I mean the free option is always there but it hasn't worked consistently for me. I'd pay $100 if I knew I'd get the feedback I need from the nitch I'm looking at.

  4. 1

    How will you pay reviewers?

    1. 1

      By passing on a portion of revenue to them. It's a very common model for survey software and market research firms.

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