When to drop your idea?
Hi! I'm a bit new here and recently did a small beta/test launch of a business idea I had, called The Grandparents Letter (grandparents-letter.carrd.co).
It's inspired by a monthly newsletter of pictures and articles that my cousins and I send to my grandparents! The concept is that you and your cousins (and aunts/uncles/parents if you want) pay a total of $5/month, submit images and captions and I’ll compile a newsletter and mail it to your grandparents! It's mostly targeted towards people like me in their 20's who don't get to see their grandparents too often.
I talked to a few people about the idea and got really good feedback, so I created a very simple website to test the idea out. I shared it around a few groups + Twitter and received a grand total of 0 signups.
I'm a bit confused because people seem to think the idea is interesting, but no one has followed through and it seems only about 5 people have even opened up the sign-up form. I'm not sure how to proceed from here because I want to make my friends buy it just because they said they'd be interested.
Any thoughts? Should I move on? Find a new audience? Thank you!!!
You should probably have people retell you the product/service in their words...
Newsletter sounds weird to me for example. The landing page itself is pretty unfocused, doesn't lead a customer journey and doesn't get to the point.
Are you just basically reselling a printing service and the spin is telling people it's for their grandparents? If so you need quality "copy" as in marketing text... Pain selling for example...
I like the idea. However it would take a family where there is a person who volunteers to be in charge of it and I think that could be where you get friction, because most people don’t want to organise stuff and chase people up!
In any case ask people why they didn’t use it and see what they say.
I’d make it free with pro features as it’s kind of a social network and you want it to grow. It could grow though family word of mouth.
Maybe the problem is that you've only explored the idea within your group of friends.
When you say you 'talked to a few people' did you start by actually vetting if this was a problem for people, or jump straight into pitching the idea?
If your friends care about you you can likely pitch them any idea (especially one that tugs at the heartstrings like this) and they will say 'Hey yeah I think that's cool, I would definitely use that!' to protect your ego.
I know you've already started on a prototype but maybe you need to be crafting your initial product design questions questions more generally. Ie start with the market 'How do you usually keep in touch with your grandparents?' 'Why is / isn't this difficult for you?' 'Talk me through the last time you wanted to keep in touch with your grandparent but found it difficult'.
Notice none of these mention a 'product' that will solve their problem. Right now you are really just digging to understand whether the problem even exists at all!
Also you may need to find a more appropriate customer segment to start vetting with. In your case that could even be visitors at an assisted living facility (with the facilities' permission naturally).