[HN Gopher] Ask HN: How do you validate your startup idea when y...
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Ask HN: How do you validate your startup idea when you've no
distribution?
Hello HN, Wondering how people with almost no distribution channel
manage to validate their ideas! I've built and published many apps
throughout school without validating the idea, but they received
20K+ installs in a short span. After reading tons of books and
articles, I realized people validate their ideas before spending
too much time on them. So I decided to build a landing page with a
waitlist for my product and posted it on Twitter and Instagram.
Though a lot of people I spoke to sounded "excited", I got very few
signups. (They're not my target audience, so I didn't ask them if
they'd pay for such a product) Now I'm wondering if my idea is bad
or if my distribution is awful. What am I doing wrong? (P.S I'm
working on a creator SaaS product)
Author : dotvignesh
Score : 64 points
Date : 2021-08-22 06:25 UTC (1 days ago)
| cameronbrown wrote:
| As other people have mentioned, landing pages + waitlists aren't
| the best nowadays. I do think a better way to get traction is to
| go and find 1-2 customers who will work closely with you to build
| a product. You mention this is for creators, so if possible,
| leverage their follower base to drive viral growth.
| wizwit999 wrote:
| Write out your idea. You can start by validating your idea by
| making sure your answering the right questions. Then you can
| reach out to people, you don't necessarily need a landing page
| but a demo probably helps.
| dotvignesh wrote:
| I typed out my idea on a Notion page, did market research,
| existing competitors, and all that. It looked quite promising
| to me. I included a small demo on my landing page as well.
| Maybe I should try reaching out to people with a better
| functional prototype. Thanks for the suggestion!
| muzani wrote:
| Landing pages and waitlists are becoming too common. It's very
| common to come across a great product on Product Hunt, only to
| find that it's just "validation" and doesn't even exist.
| Waitlists are a signal of vaporware and many just avoid them.
| dotvignesh wrote:
| True, maybe I was allured by the Dropbox and Robinhood MVP
| story to attempt this. Is launching a functional MVP a better
| choice?
| altdataseller wrote:
| What worked years ago May no longer be as effective now. Just
| like banner ads were Wow in the early days, but now users
| tune them out
| muzani wrote:
| A MVP is just something that disproves the weakest assumption
| on your list.
|
| If you're trying to prove a value proposition, I find that a
| survey works better than a landing page. PowerPoint decks
| work too. You can do something similar without being
| deceptive. Or you can just go to a subreddit of your target
| market and see what's popular or what people are complaining
| about.
| dotvignesh wrote:
| Makes sense, will give it a shot. Thanks for the
| suggestion!
| westoncb wrote:
| I wonder about this as someone working a small indie software
| business rather than a startup.
|
| Most of the replies here seem applicable only to products
| offering new capabilities, as opposed to products intending to be
| better _implementations_ in existing categories.
|
| The problem I see is I can say, "My product is like X except it's
| more usable/efficient, less buggy, and looks nicer," --but they'd
| have to take each of those claims purely on faith, so it's not
| very useful.
|
| Thinking about it more, maybe it's impossible by definition to
| pre-validate this kind of product: your offering is strictly in
| the implementation (not some abstract new feature concept), so
| the validation has to take place with respect to concrete details
| of the product's realized form.
|
| Maybe the best you can do is take this into account when devising
| strategy around the _ordering_ of features to develop: e.g. if
| your claims are on usability or performance, focus on that first.
|
| (Then again, seems dubious since most all of the example
| qualities I mentioned are sort of emergent from the entire
| product being in place, can't really develop them in
| isolation...)
|
| Any thoughts?
| [deleted]
| nemothekid wrote:
| https://twitter.com/justinkan/status/1059989657218248704?lan...
| Wump wrote:
| "Now I'm wondering if my idea is bad or if my distribution is
| awful."
|
| This is a false dichotomy, I think. Trying to grow is an
| essential part of how you evolve the idea and discover what the
| "growable idea" really is. This is one of the core things I took
| away from this PG classic: http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
| zyemuzu wrote:
| I built a SaaS product, but it's too early to say if it's a valid
| idea yet. What I did do was find 5 companies with the same
| problem, and gave them free, very early access with regular calls
| for feedback. Interestingly, several were very precise in their
| requirements, and others were open to my approach and ideas. It's
| important not to try and implement every suggestion you're given
| if it doesn't feel 'right', otherwise you risk creating a product
| that's inflexible for everyone except the customer who asked for
| it. Try and find a sample of people who will give you the time of
| day.
| MarioT wrote:
| I'm a founder of a SaaS company and can provide some insight that
| I am surprised is not really written clearly in this thread yet!
|
| There's three types of innovation.. 1. What you think people want
| 2. What they tell you they want 3. What they actually need
|
| Most startups die because their product strategy is #1, the
| chances your view of the world is going to be adopted by people
| with many different circumstances is very low. The few think,
| lets go talk to people, but then die due to misdirection..
| customers aren't PM's, they dont know how to solve problems but
| they know what their problems are.
|
| so you must figure out what do people actually need..
|
| You have two ways (well technically 3) to validate your idea 1.
| Quantitative 2. Qualitative 3. Resegment an existing market
| (questionable if you can skip traditional validation but your
| chances are better here than 1 or 2 above)
|
| If you have funding, you can do quantitative. Build stuff and get
| it in front of your audience with paid acquisition/marketing.
|
| #2 is the best if you want to be a scientist about things. Learn
| Jobs to be Done, start conducting interviews, find the problem
| folks have.. figure out if its a priority and a pattern.. there's
| lots of good JTBD literature out there, read it all.
|
| #3 - segment an existing category. Take form building for
| example, you can build a form builder with limited features for a
| niche audience.. higher ed? (Qualtrics anyone?)
|
| --
|
| Hopefully this just scratched the tip of the iceberg for you and
| gives you some direction!
|
| Just to clarify, qualitative research is less costly per dollar
| but does cost time. Check out the book "Nail it then scale it".
| exolymph wrote:
| There's no substitute for doing the legwork. You gotta go find
| people where they are and talk to them.
| [deleted]
| motoxpro wrote:
| If it's for creators, you have a built in sales list. Go to all
| of your potential customers and send an IG, FB, Twitter, etc. and
| ask to talk to them. You probably wont get responses from people
| with 2M followers but thats not your target audience, they
| already have a business built around them.
|
| Once you do this, the creators will spread the product for you if
| it's good. Being a creator is all about collaboration so they are
| used to this in terms of the products they use and sharing those
| products with their peers (and communities)
|
| In terms of distribution, this is a relatively easy one to solve.
| The classic: Figure out who your customer is and talk to them,
| you have it easy in that your customers are TRYING to be visible.
|
| source: I'm an athlete with > 100k IG followers
| adenta wrote:
| How often do people reach out to you like this?
| bacheson1293 wrote:
| I built a $100M SaaS. Do you want this more than anything? Are
| you willing to do do whatever it takes and go 1-2 years without a
| salary?
|
| If you answered yes then you just need to leap and iterate on the
| user feedback loop.
|
| My first mvp compared to what I'm selling today is completely
| different. I pivoted 20 times at least.
|
| So the name of the game is to just start building and not be
| overly concerned with making mistakes. Find what doesn't work and
| move toward what does. Mimic nature by constant evolution.
| amelius wrote:
| > If you answered yes then you just need to leap and iterate on
| the user feedback loop.
|
| The question was how to get the users and their feedback in the
| first place.
| alangibson wrote:
| I've been around the horn a few times on this. Anything short of
| a commitment to pay for the product (up to and including
| prepayment) is just noise. It's not so much that people lie about
| what they say they would do, but that it's too easy for you to
| lie to yourself about the signal you're actually getting.
|
| Here's a good example:
|
| > Though a lot of people I spoke to sounded "excited", I got very
| few signups. (They're not my target audience, so I didn't ask
| them if they'd pay for such a product)
|
| Those people weren't in your target audience, and you didn't ask
| them to pay, but I presume you take it as a positive sign that
| this particular audience was "excited." But it's not. It's not
| anything since they're not even potential customers. That's how
| we subtly deceive ourselves.
|
| Talk directly to people in your target audience (contact on
| social, then move convo to email, then move convo to telephone)
| and try to get them to put some skin in the game. One popular
| tactic is to offer a free feature request for a refundable
| prepayment.
| toss1 wrote:
| Yup, one friend who had a pre-internet sw biz with many
| different smallish products (think utilities) told me an
| interesting story.
|
| He started out describing a proposed product and asking if
| people would be interested and buy it. "YES", no question they
| liked the idea snd would pay money for it. So he went and built
| it. No takers, lots of "maybe later"s.
|
| After a few rounds of that losing game, he started asking not
| what they wantrd, but about specific pain points - 'What is
| most inconvenient about this?', 'does this task consume too
| much of your time?', 'what is the biggest tome-waster?', etc..
| When he listened and built products addressing the complaints,
| he'd make sales on the first call, even tho no one ever told
| him they were interested.
|
| I'd suggest for OP to design a question list around things
| solved by the proposed product, and related work. Do not tell
| them that you are working on a product. Talk to prospects and
| see if those are true pain points - and try to get them to say
| they're just fine - avoid politeness & confirmation bias (i.e.,
| you really don't want to fall for a few ppl being nice,
| agreeing that it's a problem, then building something they
| don't care about}.
|
| So, if you try to convince them that there is no problem, and
| they insist that there are no workarounds, they've searched and
| it's a PITA that costs them money, then you are on to
| something.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| To be honest if anyone outside of my work showed me their
| product idea I'd at least pretend to be 'excited' about it just
| to be polite.
| kbos87 wrote:
| In retrospect I've semi-unknowingly done this, and I regret
| it.
|
| The parent comment is right. There are two useful outcomes -
| they are willing to take their credit card out, or they are
| willing to give you direct feedback. Everything else is
| noise.
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| Have you read Pat Flynn's "Will It Fly"?
| this2shallPass wrote:
| Landing pages with a waitlist can be useful tools.
|
| Have you read The Mom Test? Here's a summary:
| https://www.slideshare.net/xamde/summary-of-the-mom-test
|
| I recommend reading the book.
| callmeed wrote:
| Came here to recommend The Mom Test
| dotvignesh wrote:
| I haven't read this book yet, just went through the summary in
| the link. Seems to be useful though, thanks for sharing!
| cushychicken wrote:
| It's a quick read - you can bang it out in two hours, and
| it's totally worth doing!
| aresant wrote:
| Spend the money on the validation!
|
| Recipe to spend $1000s marketing dollars vs $10,000s of
| development hours to validate ->
|
| (1) Think hard about exactly who your target customer is and how
| your product would be received.
|
| (2) Use google ad planner or FB's audience tool to see how
| accessible that audience is online, along with projected CPC
| costs
|
| (3) If you are super budget constrained scour the internet for
| free adwords / fb advertising credits eg -
| https://www.diydigitalstrategy.com/150-google-ads-coupon/ - many
| online marketing classes will come with a $100 - 150 coupon
|
| (4) Build a landing page framework WITH pricing on the landing
| page (or a pricing range eg $XX a seat with team discounts). Both
| FB & Goog are anti "waiting lists" so you need to think about how
| to get around this. Consultative sales, eg a "Somebody from our
| sales team will be in touch" doesn't break their TOS as long as
| you do a good job following up with the customers
|
| (5) Spend the money on the validation and get the added bonus of
| talking to some very early preliminary customers that are NOT in
| your orbit
| alangibson wrote:
| You can do it for $10s by using old school sales. Cold outreach
| still works if you're solving a problem.
| acomms wrote:
| This is tough in B2C though.
| asdev wrote:
| any ideas for B2C apps?
| Sophistifunk wrote:
| Why does everybody here think defrauding customers with a bait-
| and-switch (up to even taking deposits for non-existing product)
| is a good way to start a business?
| nocommandline wrote:
| I've only ever worked on something that solved a personal
| problem. I just go ahead and build something rudimentary/MVP that
| solves my problem. That MVP could still include manual bits, be
| sitting on a free subdomain (subdomains from Google App Engine),
| not have a proper logo (just use text for the branding), etc.
|
| Once I get rudimentary version, I can then put it out there in
| public to validate it. Maybe do a Show HN or do a 'low budget' Ad
| on Facebook/Twitter. This is what I did for my current project,
| https://nocommandline.com (I did a Show HN).
|
| I feel that software needs a 'trial' version to be able to gauge
| whether people will actually use it or not.
| andyxor wrote:
| google or fb ads
| contingencies wrote:
| (1) Validation via MVP for SaaS is very different to, say, a
| complex hardware product. (2) What people say they will do and
| what they will actually do are two different things. (3) Take in
| to account the potential for market shift (new competitors,
| technology change) during your delivery period and have risk
| mitigation strategies (eg. pivot/sale/exit). (4) Scratch a common
| itch. (5) Validate by proxy - see similar ventures gain traction
| in allied markets that demonstrate clients exist and investors
| have interest.
| kcsavvy wrote:
| Product market fit isn't just building a cool product. It's when
| that product meets an audience that values and pays for it.
|
| Distribution IS part of a startup idea. It's an essential
| ingredient. Don't think about idea and distribution as separate
| things. If you can't find your target audience to validate your
| idea with, you have an incomplete startup idea, by definition!
|
| If you are unsure how to find your target audience today,
| building your product will not fix this problem. Speaking to real
| users should be a higher priority than building or planning
| features.
|
| For advice on speaking to users I only recommend one short book -
| "The Mom Test". In that book you will learn why "excitement" is a
| very misleading signal. There is a good reason why YC partners
| constantly recommend it.
| martythemaniak wrote:
| You don't want to spend too much time, but you have to spend
| _some_ amount of time and effort to validate it. I think it
| scales with the ambition of your idea, but something like 3
| months of full time work on well-executed, but non-groundbreaking
| service sounds pretty reasonable.
|
| The problem with landing pages, waitlists, etc is that they'll
| give you very little - until people are using your product
| everything they say is suspect. They need to be using your
| product, be vested in it, care about it, have opinions about it,
| etc. Landing pages will only get you a "huh, that's interesting,
| I might try it out"
|
| To validate it, find several dozen people that will use and love
| it and give you real feedback. This is a highly manual process
| and it should be.
| [deleted]
| cryptica wrote:
| I'm not a fan of validating ideas. The problem is that modern
| people often like things which are not good for them (e.g.
| processed foods, drugs, social media, bureaucracy, etc...). The
| product might make them less efficient or harm them, but people
| still like it for some reason.
|
| Customers are often irrational, especially with the current
| heavily manipulated monetary system. I only want to work on
| products that are beneficial for users (in a meaningful, long
| term way), even if people might not understand the benefits today
| (and it might not sell at all).
|
| Bootstrapping (unlike VC funding) allows you to wait out the
| insanity instead of forcing you to profit from it. If you have a
| good product, people will come to their senses sooner or later -
| You will get steady, linear growth but it will be solid growth.
|
| Most of the time, exponential growth is fickle. Users got
| overexcited, they made an impulsive decision; the next phase is
| disillusionment.
| solumos wrote:
| You may have to network your way into finding customers. Who do
| you know who knows creators? Is there a way you can get in front
| of creators so that you can test your assumptions in front of
| them?
| tmaly wrote:
| I once tried the following approach and it saved me a ton of
| development time. In reality, it validated that there was not a
| good pattern for a problem to be solved in the space I was
| looking at.
|
| Figure out who your target audience is first. You might have to
| talk to a lot of people. Get good at listening and asking open
| ended questions ( see book Mom Test )
|
| Once you have a rough idea who your audience is, try to find
| about 30 people in that audience to talk to face to face. You can
| use a script like in the book Running Lean. You want to keep good
| notes on each conversation. Build a table/matrix of all things
| you uncover across these 30 or so conversations. If you can see a
| clear pattern in the problems a majority of the people have, that
| could be the idea you build a product for.
| pbreit wrote:
| What's the idea?
|
| I think in general if you're honest with yourself, you have a
| decent chance of evaluating your idea's desirability. Go with the
| YC mantra of "Make something people want". If you are scratching
| your own itch, that could be a good way to start.
|
| "Creators" are a fickle bunch so not always the best audience.
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