Whats your idea validation strategy? And could it be easier?
You have an idea. Now you want to see if it might have an audience/market.
Very practically, how do you go about validating it? I mean literally from something in your head, to some action/result/data which makes you think.. ok, I might want to start building an MVP.
And.... within that process.. which bit do you think could be easier/faster and/or, which is the most painful?
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Not the only way but some pointers especially if you have don't have any audience.
great staightfoward advice, I like this a lot. :-)
Thankyou
@upenv quick question. I'm inspired by other's advice on trying to find "problem" :-)
My question to you is.. since you mentioned landing pages...
No. I am not.
👍🏽🙇🏽
Great breakdown! At mvpAI, we automate this whole process using AI personas—which simulates user feedback in under 24 hours, no surveys needed. We'd love to know: which step of validation feels most painful for founders? Collecting feedback? Recruiting users? Translating it into decisions?
Hey Andy! Great question.
I'm going to challenge and reframe some of the points you made. These are all my opinions so I encourage you to take them with a grain of salt and offer your own perspectives too
Problem first
Let's flip this around. Idea comes second, problem comes first. And we're not looking for audiences or markets we're looking for problems.
Find a problem first, understand the people who experience this problem. Talk to them to really understand not only the tangible pain points like wasted resources (time, money, etc) but also the less tangible, emotional pain points (frustration, reputation, etc)
If you're stuck in this loop of coming up with ideas and struggling to validate them I encourage you to put yourself in environments with high problem exposure.
Environments with exposure to problems
I always knew I wanted to start my own business one day but I didn't know exactly what it would be. Because of this I looked for jobs that wouldn't just pay me with money but they'd also pay me with knowledge, experience, networks and importantly; exposure to problems. If you're a technical person I'd highly encourage you to join an agency.
I can't think of a better environment for the early stages of an indie hacker's career than a web agency. You'll likely work for multiple clients in parallel, you'll see a bunch of different industries and if you put in the effort to build relationships your luck surface area will grow exponentially.
Look for agencies that do 1-3 month projects. The length of the feedback loop is important. If you join a big agency that takes on multi year projects you'll get an order of magnitude fewer opportunities to find patterns in your client's problems. And that's the key here – patterns of problems.
Let's say you work on an ecommerce project and find a problem with a checkout flow. Your team enhances the UX and delivers an improved conversion rate for your client. A few months later you get another ecommerce client and notice they have a very similar problem so you take the previous solution and refactor it to work within this new website. This is an example of a problem that could be transformed into a productised solution.
The incredible thing about working in a role like this is that you'll be paid. Paid to:
And you don't have to go out and look for problems because your clients will be approaching you with problems on a platter.
Ok so what happens if you've put in the work and you've found some potential problem patterns?
Validation
Talk. To. Your. Customers. I know you've heard this a million times but its the truth. How do you validate that people are experiencing a problem and need it solved? Let them tell you.
Let's say we've decided to work on the ecommerce checkout UX problem we identified earlier. Where do we even start? I'd break down the fundamental mechanics that contributed to the problem's existence. For example:
We're trying to figure out what smoke looks like. Once we know, we can look for smoke everywhere and follow it to the fire.
Maybe we could look for websites using those specific shopify themes and check whether it looks like they're experiencing the problem too. Maybe we know that this issue is most relevant to the fashion industry so we can start reaching out to people in our network or forming connections with agencies that focus more in those spaces. Perhaps we know that marketing departments are the people who feel this paint the most so we can reach out to marketing people at those companies.
I encourage you to focus on the pain point in these conversations. Avoid questions like "would you use an app that does X?" and try "are you frustrated by X?". People love to be supportive and if you ask them "would you use this app?" they won't want to hurt your feelings and will probably say yes.
Once you sense that this problem is striking a chord with the marketing person you're talking to – dig deeper by mirroring. For example they might say
Being genuinely curious is the key. You're listening and empathising, not solving at this stage. Doing this with several people in similar industries or who use similar tools allows you to ask questions about pain points the previous person mentioned. We're trying to validate; is this a problem that just one or two people have or does everyone in this space experience the same pain?
From here you'll very likely know whether or not your idea has legs. You may even have gotten some insights into how you should position your business. For example:
If you made it this far I appreciate you taking the time! I'd say "good luck" with your business ideas but hopefully this post helps you realise how much of luck is self made :)
Feel free to ask me any questions
@aldosch hey there! I did read it all (twice!), thanks for taking the time to write this! :-)
In the spirit of taking your advice, let me ask you a question then :-)
"are you frustrated by" the effort required to set up a landing page to validate your ideas?
I guess your point though is that it's not about the idea.. it's the problem. And that's a really good point. I guess I'd define an idea as something that has popped into existince FROM a problem.
It's tough isn't it since what you're validating is actuall a bunch of different things.
For example, if you're looking for a problem in the real world then, as you said, you need identify a real problem.
If you've done that, then you can come up with an idea for the problem.. and then you need to test whether that idea or solution has a fit with the problem.
But you're also actualy validating your value prop, positioning, acquisition strategy.
There are other ways to find a problem. You might be solving a problem that YOU have.
And then the validation is actually, hey, do other people have this problem, and, are they willing to pay for it..
so it's all pretty complex! But interesting to break down...
So, if I was going to apply your advice to an idea I have that has come from a problem I have, I'd ask:
"are you frustrated by" the effort required to set up a landing page to validate your ideas?
But the, would you push back and say I'm still asking the wrong question?
thanks again by the way, this is all great!
Thanks for the reply Andy, it really made me think. Hope you don't mind another wall of text!
😤 Frustration
Honestly I usually enjoy the effort! That's not to say its sunshine and rainbows the whole way but that frustration is often an essential ingredient of the process. If it was easy everyone would do it and there wouldn't be much value in it right?
Your question reminds me a little of the Artist Resentment & Gratitude Diagram. When I first watched that I related to it all except I'd replace
resentmentwithfrustrationbecause I never really resent my work. I might get annoyed that a framework can't do what I thought it could or that a stakeholder has different expectations to mine.🕊️ The medium is the message
While a landing page is one way to validate an idea its not the only one. I think about landing pages just like any other medium, so I may not necessarily start building one right away. The channel your message passes through contributes to its interpretation and ultimately its meaning to your audience.
Take for example, how do you feel if you've found a youtube video you're excited to watch and just after you click it you're blasted with a completely irrelevant ad? Millions of people dislike that so much they install ublock origin + sponsorblock or pay for youtube premium right?
So going back to landing pages – they are situational just like any other medium. You'll probably need one eventually, especially if you're building internet companies. But if your target market would respond better to a phone call, a DM on twitter, a billboard, maybe even a polite entrepreneur walking into their lobby with a box of donuts asking to chat... those are all totally valid too.
I was looking at a landing page made by one of our fellow indiehackers @JosieJoe. To be honest the landing page was really well done and I had very little to criticise from a technical execution perspective. The biggest improvement I think Jocelyn could make to her landing page is to emphasise what makes her product special, which is actually quite different to her competitors.
🤷♀️ To be fair, I like making websites
I feel like I should conclude by saying I'm probably incredibly biased. I've been making websites for a decade and its always been fun. Many of us in this community are lucky enough to earn a living creating cool stuff on the internet and I'm sure that makes us think about web technology more than the rest of the world.
Ultimately we're selling to humans. Every new type of communication absorbs the formats that came before
The only constant is people and what matters to them.
If there are any specific parts in the process of spinning up a website that are really frustrating I'd love to dig into it – could make for a great post in itself!
great reply @aldosch, really enjoyed reading it! You bring up a lot of thought provoking stuff.
In my journey I'm readiing a lot and trying to apply different advice.. but, after a while it feels like burn out. There's a million ways to skin a cat and I guess you need to do it in a way that feel good to you? As in... I've read all this stuff about what you should and shouldn't do.. but, like you said. the medium matters, so you gotta pick one that resonates with you.
To be honest what I was really getting at with this post was about validating a landing page builder.
That validation process if work-in-progress :-)
Here is pretty much the plan I used when creating my SaaS:
Validating a startup idea is an iterative process. Stay adaptable, learn from the data and feedback you collect, and be willing to pivot if necessary.
wow this is so great... brief but specific, thank you!
Right now I'm creating a course for my sport psychology coaching website, Perseverance Performance. I have a friend who coaches triathletes and we've talked about giving it to them as a product test and having them fill out a survey afterwards. After that I'll likely add it to my Substack or Website.
What we did with Storist.me
As a result, we calculated the CAC and conversion rate to paid customers using the most expensive marketing channel.
PS. Without MVP, no-code, landing pages, and something like this...
wow, that's amazing. Can I ask.. what did the numbers look like for this experiement, from how much you paid for ads, and then how the funnel went from there? This is super inspiring!
I think my BIGGEST concerns is.. how do I even start that "top of the funnel". Looks like you used ads.. but man, I have no idea where to even start with ads!
About numbers:
– We spent, more or less, $3k on Instagram ads + $1k as a grant to a marketer (it's critical to work with a professional if you don't know how to work with marketing campaigns).
– The funnel averaged 200 users.
– In the end, we had 30 paying customers.
About the idea:
Some methods from my practice:
But in my personal opinion, if you want to find a good idea, you need:
– to enhance your awareness skills, meaning improving the number of cases in different areas you know about. Moreover, after 10+ years of mentoring young entrepreneurs and product leaders, we created Storist.me. It aims to improve awareness and other important skills for entrepreneurs based on ideas from bestsellers and tons of business cases related to these bestsellers.
– to improve your creative skills, for example, with books like "Thinkertoys" by Michael Michalko (https://a3.storist.me/#/courses/thinkertoys) or "Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative" by Austin Kleon (https://a3.storist.me/#/courses/steal-like-an-artist).
Love this strategy 😃 👏, well done.
I've been going to different trade conventions to show my MVP. Way easier to see the feedback in person, seeing how people use it, etc. than to do it online.
My process:
I wrote about this here if you're interested: https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/validate-your-startup-idea-like-a-pro-my-4-step-framework-cab983374a30
this is great, thanks! Do you have more info on the " Identify Notable Problems" section? As in, what if you're starting with a problem YOU have and so naturally you've already started to come up with a solution in your head. How do you then ask questions without putting the solution in there? 🤔
I would figure out:
great
For my first saas im gonna try to modify add ai to a service in unique way but this service is being done without ai and its profitable so i wonder if it will work. My validation was the fact the other company is profitable