getfirealerts.com

I'm trying to solve a problem that folks living in bushfire prone areas have with getting sufficient advanced warning. In Perth (as with many Australian cities), we have the radio, TV, and very good infrastructure if you want to go and "pull" information regarding fires and alerts - https://www.emergency.wa.gov.au/

However, there is no good way to "push" these alerts to your device/phone. So I'm building it - https://getfirealerts.com/

Before I commit too much time (i have a full time job and young family), I want to make sure folks will pay for this. I don't have time to look for funding right now and from the folks I've spoken to, it's a pretty painful problem. The question is: are there enough people for whom it's sufficiently painful to create a market?

I'm validating this product in two steps:

1. A feasibility test to see if folks are "likely to pay", and then if they are

2. A genuine MVP which will take money from customers. Nothing more "valid" then users parting with real money right?

I've just completed a week-long test where I take users through a "demo" and at the end invite folks to click a button which reads "Sign up for $19/year". When you click this you see a page explaining that the product is not yet ready. I then invite the user to leave their email. In exchange I'll contact them when it is ready and offer them a good discount.

Using only 4-5 hours of my time on about ~10 Facebook groups which seemed to reach my target market, I sent 876 uniques to my page. 52 clicked "Sign up for $19/year" and 43 left their email. That's a 4.9% conversion. My target was 3.0% to make this "sustainable" (more about that in another post).

So I've passed this first test. I'm now building out the MVP so I have something to sell. I'm deep into the Stripe integration doco and a small set of tasks including a Privacy Policy, Terms Of Service and securing some insurance to ensure that I'm "legit" when I enter into a business transaction with these initial customers.

Am I forgetting anything? Tips, comments, questions all welcome.