Validate validate validate.
One of my shortcomings as an Indie maker is not validating my brilliant idea before spending weeks building a product no one wants.
IdeaZap is a small tool I built to quickly jot down and share ideas to help validate them in a structured manner.
Upcoming features:
- Include images
- Ask specific questions to poll takers
- Discover location, occupation, and age of poll takers
What features would help you validate your idea?
Wow! This is so simple. How are you reaching your users ? Also, are many people using it ?
Thanks! Currently I'm in feedback mode - haven't been pushing it much s not too many users yet.
Cool. I don't what will become of this, but I loved it's simplicity. It's like validating your snippets not just business idea with people you know. You write some steps , generate a link and share on your FB. It could also become like sharing steps of doing something, like how to reach to my house.
Exactly! Glad you see the value. Now I just need a way to productize it and generate a profit to keep it running :)
hahaha, just today I was whining about not having a place to validate my ideas.
Here is my want list:
So I tried IdeaZap; if you see the test, that was me :D Everything worked fine as far as what you have going on there so far.
I need the website to be able to supply the community of people to look at the idea. I have very few followers etc. so trying to find them myself is clearly a pain. Basically I need product hunt, but for much much earlier stage, and preferably with some guaranteed visibility. (I tried one launch on product hunt but I'm such a noob, my strategy was all off and at the end barely anyone looked at it). I would like the platform to not penalize me so hard just because I haven't figured out the right strategy yet (especially since lots of effort is required to get to the point where you can list your product on product hunt in the first place).
I definitely agree with the pain point of finding targeted users to get your idea in front.
Until there is much traffic on IdeaZap, that is going to be hard to do organically.
I do plan on introducing a paid feature ($10ish) which would allow you to create a paid targeted poll with a guaranteed amount of results.
In terms of your slides and photos, that will be coming in the next update. I'll keep you posted!
Thanks for the great feedback.
let me know when you have updates, I'm a very eager tester
Hey Neea!
Happy to report back to you with some updates:
These updates are just fleshing out the current stage of IdeaZap, with paid polls etc. coming in further larger updates.
Would you mind if I shoot you an email so we can chat about testing?
Thanks!
Yeah absolutely, email me; would love to check out your changes.
Hey JJ,
Nice job on the first rev. How much time did you spend on it? Love the simplicity and the open space.
So, speaking as an "idiot developer that never validates his ideas before he shoves himself in the basement coding away for months at a time and launching to crickets" hypothetical personality: I create an idea on IdeaZap, but I have the added work of driving traffic to it, right? (This isn't a bad thing). If so, how do we educate the user on how to get qualified traffic to give feedback? I think there's value there. If I don't have to drive traffic to the post and you've got some sort of built-in community, how are community visitors incentivized to keep visiting and giving feedback?
Just curious because I think there might be something here.
-- Jimmy
Thanks Jimmy!
This took me about a weekend and built with no code on Bubble.is
Great question.
Until there's a large amount of incentivized users coming to IdeaZap, you'd need a source for driving your traffic to the poll.
There is a paid and free angel I'm working on to solve that.
Paid would allow for you to create a $10ish poll to target specific types of users and get a guaranteed (100ish) amount of results.
The free angle is to create a "trending" page for ideas, to categorize ideas, make them easy to browse and to create a kind of "bookmarking" feature for all your ideas. This all to help users keep coming back and to give your idea more exposure.
I do plan on creating some kind of points system with badges to try to gamify it for those giving feedback.
JJ
I have heard from others that it is better to look for a problem to solve and focus on that rather than the idea. I believe it's better to find someone who you picture that the ideal customer and talk to them without bringing up your idea and see if your idea solves one of their problems. I particularly like this piece by Jason Cohen that goes into more detail: https://blog.asmartbear.com/customer-validation.html
Yes, good point. I tried to keep that in mind when building IdeaZap. It's a simple tool to help formulate your idea and then foward that to whoever you see fit.
I plan on expanding on that thought by including targeted paid polls in the future.
Thanks for your feedback!
I don't have many ideas that I want to build so it is natural for me to want to ask people their problems but it needs to be done in a way that removes as much bias as possible.
That could be a whole other product on its own ;)