SnaggedIt

I've heard that creating a landing page is a good idea when seeking validation for an idea. The purpose of the landing page is to give easily digestible information to those you're seeking validation from.

As I can't code well enough to be able to scrape even the most basic of landing pages together I decided to use WIX to get me up-and-running and it's done just that. Within a couple of hours, I have a landing page up-and-running at minimal cost (about £15).

The purpose of this landing page is to provide a snapshot and summary of our idea with the intention of helping us seek out further validation.

As we do gather input, advice and feedback from our validation exercise, no doubt our landing page will change.

SnaggedIt Landing Page - www.snaggedit.co.uk

My Co-Founder (the technical one) suggested that before we go diving in and wireframing, coding, design, we should validate our idea first. Sounds like a good idea.

The difficult thing here is that validation of an idea only works if you can find your intended target audience, and the even more difficult thing is to then communicate your idea to them in a way they'll understand.

Being new to Indie Hackers, I thought I'd take a look around and I quickly found lots of tips on how to help (a) find your intended target audience (or some form of it), and (b) how to communicate your idea to them.

The route I have chosen is to find groups and forums of dissatisfied New Home Build customers. Unsurprisingly, there are quite a few groups on Facebook (e.g. DO NOT BUY a Persimmon Home).

I've started by asking the groups "how they go about creating a snagging list?"

Whilst the responses are still coming in, and I'm hopeful of getting a lot more, it's becoming quite clear that homeowners are creating a snagging list in 2 ways...

Snagging Way 1 - Using a professional snagging company. This will be comprehensively carried out by the company but it is also costly (approx £300 - £1000).

Snagging Way 2 - Using pen, paper, spreadsheets, email, phone, and in person. Actually, many have reported doing a combination of the lot which seems crazily messy.

I'm going to keep seeking out further validation in this way to see if there's a continued trend with how homeowners are creating their snagging list. So far, my initial assumptions of how it was being done and the potential problems that will occur have been founded, which is a good thing for our potential idea.

So, I had an idea for a product recently. It's an idea that I thought of whilst walking along on my way from work (basic I know).

The idea is to provide New Build Homeowners with a way to record and report defects in their properties.

I am UK based and in the UK (might be different in other countries) when a Housing Developer builds a new house, they will carry out quality assurance on the house but the new homeowners will also have the opportunity to do this. The way in which this is done is often on paper and it can be very much up to the homeowner to spot things and have some knowledge of house building in order to do it properly.

What's the alternative? - In the UK there are a number of 'Snagging Companies'. These are businesses that provide a service to go into a home (on behalf of the homeowner) and carry out a snagging list. They will have knowledge of house building and they will spot defects that a homeowner may not. Sounds great, but, it does come at a cost. Prices range from £300 up to £1,000 which all depends on the size of the house. This is a lot of money to someone who has just bought a brand new house which has likely cost them hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Here's where I see the opportunity - The UK has a housing crisis and over the next 20 years there will be thousands (if not millions) of new homes built. Many of these new homes will be bought by those under 30 and this comes with two aspects (1) their budgets will be stretched already due to purchasing a house which they can barely afford due to the high cost of homes in the UK, and (2) they are digital natives.

These two aspects draw me to the conclusion that (a) new build homeowners will be reticent to spend more money on having their home professionally snagged, and (b) paper just isn't going to cut it when it comes to snagging.