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Share the story: How you validate your ideas?

Hey, guys! I would love to know how you validated an idea you are working on right now. Please, share the story with others 😉❤️

I'm specifically interested in:

  1. What validation techniques did you use?
  2. What was your validation process?
  3. When did you decide the idea is validated and ready to work on?

For my project of interactive presentations, it was:

  1. I created a simple landing page.
  2. I asked students of my Alma mater who are progressive thinking lectors in the faculty. They came up with some names. I wrote them a personalized email saying students think they might be interested in better presentations in their lectures. I talked to them. They provided me great feedback and basically, we designed the product together.
  3. When teachers committed to using better presentations for hundreds of students.

P.S. You can find some great validation examples in my recent blog post.

  1. 4

    We did it the wrong way with shipit: had an itch, didn't do enough research for alternatives, thought there's a market and launched. Only to find out later that there were tools that could satisfy our needs :-D Oops.

    We still decided to go with it and build a product but go a little bit more niche. Since then I've been doing a lot of potential customer interviews (something that I should have done before launching). Contacting companies and people directly and asking them for help with research. Almost every week I am meeting various companies and discuss the problem space, how they do it, what processes they have, which tools they use. This helps us with the direction, marketing message, features, and definition of the target audience.

    The co-working space I'm working from has one company whose founder did exactly that before launching. For about 6 months he was interviewing lots and lots of people, then built an MVP and according to those needs. 1.5 years later he grew the team to 9 people while I'm still struggling with finding the first paying customer :-D

    1. 1

      Hey man, great comment! Thanks for sharing :) Going for a niche is a good idea. I'm also considering focusing on dev meetups at the beginning.

  2. 2

    Personally I prefer to prepare landing pages and push myself to give something tangible to people as soon as possible.

    Once the MVP of the product is ready, I send out an email to everyone who requested early access and then read/listen to what they have to say.

    I then make a Trello board where I categorise the feedback: bugs, improvements to existing features, requests for new features.

    Once the product is officially live, I make a roadmap to ensure that their voices have been heard and that I am working on it.

    This is also my strategy for SplitCSS.com

    I strongly believe that people who request an early signup, are genuinely interested in your product and would be honest to you about what might they find useful.

    Every time you implement a feature that meets more of their needs, it increases your chances of making a sale.

    At last, they are part of the market. And the market dictates who survives.

    1. 2

      Did you set a goal of how many subscribers do you need to have before starting working on the MVP?
      What marketing efforts have you done to gather emails from your potential customers?

      1. 1

        To be honest, I have already started working on the MVP.

        If I can't get other people excited enough about it, I will use it for my own projects.

        Medium and devto posts are on their way. I want to get the word out and see what people have to say.

        The current effort to gather emails is a simple landing page where people can sign up for free early access. I have just started basically.

        Other platforms are ProductHunt, HackerNews, Reddit and actively tweeting about it.

        Reaching out to my friend developers is also part of the strategy.

        I am a big fan of the "nothing-to-lose" mentality. "Noone cares" is the default state anyway.

        How would you gather email addresses in a general case?

        1. 1

          I don't think there is a general case. You need to focus on your niche target group and find the best way.
          It doesn't need to be emails necessarily. It could be followers on Twitter (which I find a modern way these days) or a Facebook group or blog or IG account, etc.

  3. 2

    For kareeba.com I did a market research, ask for friends what they think about an marketplace where you sell and buy African Clothes and accessories. They give me a positive feedback so I quickly make my MVP with WordPress and some plugins.

    I also realize that people like the product( I share daily post on IG and FB) and with help from my sister, I got 4 sellers from Africa.
    Now I'm doing some promotion because it hard to let people understand the product, especially here in Italy...

    1. 1

      Good luck with your project! :)
      Personally, I don't like to ask friends for feedback because often they are not honest with you and they give you positive feedback. I prefer talking to a potential customer or strange people because they tell you how it is.

      1. 1

        Agree with that! I don't only ask friends but also people I never met like people online in some of FB groups.

  4. 2

    I’m trying to pick ideas where I’d be the customer, based on problems I’ve had, and then with the best of those do some mom test like stuff. I don’t think I’ll be following every rule in that book but I certainly won’t say “I’m gonna make a github clone, whatcha reckon?” :-)

  5. 2

    For us, our product (birdsend.co) is an email marketing tool for content creators. There are already tons of players in the email marketing space (some have already been in business for more than a decade), so the idea is already validated.

    I think what you're doing is great for validation -- talking directly to your target audience, ask for their feedback, what could be improved upon, what they want, why, how much would they pay, etc.

    The landing page you create should also have a prominent opt-in box to capture email addresses of those who are interested in your product when it's released. You could say something like "We're currently building the app, and if you're interested when we go live, enter your email address to get an exclusive discount".

    1. 1

      Thanks for the feedback. Yes, I'm gathering emails but it might be more prominent, as you said.

  6. 2

    My product is for React.js developers (divjoy.com). I didn't do much early validation honestly. I started sharing an early prototype around and got some positive feedback, which kept me going, but it was a good 6 months of full-time development before getting something out that felt "minimally viable".

    Once the MVP was ready I shared it to Twitter and Hacker News and it pretty much blew up. Ended up near the top of HN all day w/ a lot of really enthusiastic feedback. I still hadn't validated how much people would pay, but that was enough for me to consider it "validated" and start thinking about the next steps.

    1. 1

      I mean, I love your product but not everyone can afford 6 months of full-time development. It had to be a leap of faith, I guess. Glad it works and good luck in the future :)

      1. 1

        Oh yeah feels pretty crazy in retrospect and was a great way to blow through all my savings. Happy I went for it, although I don’t necessarily advise it.

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