The Value of Visualizing Ideas Quickly (And Launching My First Product!)

A good friend and prolific maker, Ed Moss, shared some words of wisdom with me last week (I’m paraphrasing here, but the point is the same):

Work on being able to visualize your ideas quickly. This will allow you to get higher quality feedback and iterate faster.

I thought this was great advice. As a startup, speed of iteration is a (if not THE) key competitive advantage. When I hear about a problem from a potential customer, I want to be able to quickly visualize a solution and put it in front of them for feedback.

So, I thought I’d practice that skill last week by visualizing an idea that aims to solve a problem I have faced. This was the rough idea:

Side note: Typically, when I have an idea, I quickly jot it down in Trello like this^

I found this post by Shane Doyle, the fastest way to prototype and test landing pages with Notion, and decided to build a landing page.

Writing good copy is hard! I was tempted to use tools like Headlime.com or Copy.ai but the struggle to write clear and concise messaging for the landing page was where the idea was getting shaped in my mind. It forced me to think through the idea holistically, including the target customer, product experience, pricing, and positioning.

I used Namecheap to make a logo. I attempted to use BotSociety to build a mock of the slack bot, but it didn’t turn out well. So, I just manually inspected and edited the html of slack in the browser to create the bot screenshot. And I used Typeform to create the sign up form, which actually embeds well in Notion.

In just a few hours, I had built a landing page for WeeklyArticleClub in Notion!

Let me know if you have any feedback on the landing page. It's already a bit different than when I took that screenshot.^

The main value to learning how to visualize ideas quickly is that, with high enough fidelity, you can launch and learn. It reminds me of this tweet by Jason Fried that Ed, again, shared with me and has been stuck in my mind:

If you didn't watch the video, here's the gist of it:

You can't validate anything by asking about ideas or laying something out and asking how people might feel about it if something existed.

You validate something by believing in it, you build it, you put it out there, and that's when it's validated...or not.

🤯 I took this to heart and, while there are more than a few reasons that I can think of that Weekly Article Club may not work, I decided to get an MVP version of it out there and see what the market says. Taking something from idea to execution is hard work! But the easier and faster it is for me to build an MVP and test the market, the higher likelihood for learning, iteration, and success.

So, I spent the last week building a working Slack bot for Weekly Article Club and it's now ready!!

Go ahead and try it out! It's on the Weekly Article Club landing page, just fill out the form and you'll get the link to install the Slack application.

After you try it out, let me know what you think in the comments below 👇

#ShipIt

Originally posted on startuplessons.substack.com