3.3 KiB
Idea Validation
I know what it's like to try to market a product that no one wants, I’ve built two that completely failed. No one wanted them and I wasted months trying to make it work.
I’ve also built successful products and the key difference was that the successful products solved a real problem. It sounds obvious but it’s easy to forget sometimes.
The hard part is how you validate that you are solving a real problem so I thought I’d share exactly how I did it:
Step one: Start with a problem thesis and talk to users
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I was a founder and I had a problem that I suspected other founders had too
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So I had my problem thesis and the next step was to talk to my would-be users to see if the problem was real and to understand their view of it better
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I made a post on r/SaaS and r/indiehackers asking founders to answer a few questions and in return I would give them feedback on whatever they were building
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The key part here was offering them something in return for their time. That makes it a lot easier to get answers
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Here's one of the posts if you’re curious: https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1ea1cpd/lets_exchange_feedback/
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The got me in touch with 8-10 founders who were willing to answer my survey.
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I asked questions about pain points related to the problem and tried to get an idea if they were willing to adopt the solution I had in mind.
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The responses were positive so I had the green light to start building a simple first version
Step two: Building the MVP
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This is the easy part. Who doesn’t love building?
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The critical thing here was that I tried to understand what the survey responses were telling me and built a bare bones solution addressing the pain points of these people
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I built fast. Around 30 days for the MVP
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That's it. It was time to market this MVP and see if I can get some users
Step three: Marketing and collecting feedback
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First I set a clear goal. It wasn’t about getting customers, I just wanted as much feedback as possible so I would need active users. Understanding how to make the product better is so much more valuable at this point
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I set the goal of getting 20 active users in two weeks
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Then I asked myself where my users hang out and the answer was X and Reddit
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Next step was to set daily volume targets. I decided to do 5 posts and 50 replies on X every day and on Reddit I would just write a new post when I had something that had worked well on X
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So I knew exactly what to do every day and then I just executed that plan. It was easy, because I just had to take action, no questions asked
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Two weeks later I had hit 100 users
That was the validation process I used. From there on, all I had to do was improve the product based on what users were telling me and continue marketing. That has taken me all the way to $7,300/mo and growth just becomes easier with time.
I hope my journey can inspire some of you to not give up and to follow a solid process for building your product.
Feel free to ask if you have any questions.