Stop Building, Start Selling.
One of the most common mistakes you can make as a founder is building something based completely on your own ideas or assumptions.
Only to find out later that the product or service doesn’t exactly fit the market’s needs, and you have to backtrack and rebuild it.
Let’s talk about how to avoid that.
The Most Common Mistake
It’s easy to get excited about an idea and dive straight into building.
But if you don’t take the time to properly understand your target audience’s needs, you risk creating a product that doesn’t exactly fit what they’re looking for.
Or worse - you create a product that nobody wants at all.
This is the quickest and easiest way to waste time, effort and money with a new project, and new founders fall into this trap all the time.
The Smarter Move: Sell It First
Selling your idea before you build it (usually) doesn’t mean charging money, although crowdfunding is an option too.
But rather, it means engaging your target audience and trying to capture interest in your idea before you take the time to build it.
Begin with a solid idea in mind and plan out how your product or service is going to work.
Then, just as if you had created the first version of your project, build out a landing page that walks users through what your project does and how it works.
The purpose of this landing page will be to start building a waitlist of users who are interested in your project, and would like to be the first to know when it becomes available.
The goal is simple: if it’s “selling”, you’re on the right track. Go ahead and start building the first version of the product.
If it’s not, then something’s missing.
Go back to your research, run more interviews, and find out what the market’s looking for.
Key Benefits
There are a few key benefits to validating your idea with this strategy:
- Create the best version of your product the first time
- Your waitlist will be the best and easiest way to find early customers
- Save a ton of time, effort, money, and headache
- Take your time and don’t overlook this phase of your project.
Bootstrapping a new product or service isn’t about luck - it’s about science.
Follow a plan, and trust the process.
Until next time,
Avery
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The problem with this approach is this: say that you get 10k visitors at a 5% conversion rate. That would translate to 500 captured emails.
That's a pretty damn good number but it's a liar. Here's why: all those users had to do was input their email into a field and press a button. They were not asked to grab out their CC and do a payment, subscribe, etc. Ask 500 people to also pay for your upcoming product and maybe 10 (20 if you're lucky) will pay. Sometimes not even one would. That's the real number of users wanting your service/product. Typically, this number is 0 when all we present is a landing page which captures an email.
I'd argue the best way is not too build full scale product, not to present a landing page only. It's just like in space, the golden lock zone. You build the MVP, scrappy, ugly but functional, solving the actual problem, 0 polish. You ask for people to pay for it. If you get 5 people off of 500, at a 1% conversion rate, you still won. There's interest and those people are paying.
This is a good point, and there's something to be said for the difference between asking for an email address and asking users to pay.
But building a waitlist is simply a pre-MVP step you can take to see if you even have the idea right.
You might make some changes or even full pivots, just by trying to build a waitlist.
It's much easier to make those changes on a Google Doc than to the MVP you've already built.
I think it's definitely the case that the best approach might depend on your eventual business model.
If it's B2C, small average customer LTV or otherwise PLG motion, having a signal in quantity over quality is probably valuable and may be worth the minimal time of throwing up a landing page.
In B2B, or where you'd expect a much narrower customer : revenue ratio, it's probably smart to focus on getting 1 or few paying customers as you build things out.
I thought there was some pretty interesting insights from Dax Dasilva (CEO Lightspeed) on the latter approach in his recent podcast on 20VC.
Haha! The coding hustle and marketing brain freeze