Problem 🤕
I want to validate my startup idea. Understand whether the idea has merit and whether I should pursue it or not.
Solution 🕵️
Find the closest way to mimic your ultimate customer offering. The plan is to invest the least amount of money or build minimally (ideally nothing), yet get a sense of the market.
Why and when to worry about this?⏱️
a. Rationale
The usual norm is of individuals either working on an idea which has no market OR those who build costly and wrong products for a market that doesn't exist. You should avoid being either of those individuals.
b. Timing
Right after you have an idea and you are serious about pursuing entrepreneurship. While you might not need to invest too much money to validate your idea, it still requires significant effort.
Implementation 🔨
a. Realistic expectation
Definitive answers aren't really the nature of the startup world - you can just make smart bets. The process here is to help you make the smartest bet, i.e. maximum market information with minimum investment.
b. Process
This will be a two-part process.
i. Demonstrate what your product is about
ii. Drive relevant users to it
i. Demonstrate what your product is about
- Landing page
- Using landing page builders, make a simple yet beautiful and informative website
- The goal is to clearly explain what your offering is
- Here are the sections that your page should have
- Hero section
- Why you OR how do you solve the problems
- A personalised note to them (optional)
- Example: A good landing page - Link
- A detailed tutorial on the content on how to build this to be covered later
- Showcase it through content
- Write content that caters to your relevant audience
- While you don't demonstrate your product, you can:
- Understand if the problem is serious enough
- If your approach to it is interesting/suitable to users
- Topics that can be covered include:
- Problems that your users currently face: In-depth articles, lists
- Useful tips for your target audience
- Case studies on others who are facing the same problems
- Do this through either a newsletterOR even consistent posts on the relevant social platform your target audience visits
- Example: How Remote Clan was built using a newsletter - Link
- Buy a white-label solution
- Don't build another product
- Instead, buy/use something off the shelf which sort of addresses the problem
- It doesn't have to be a perfect solution (that's what you will be eventually building)
- This allows you to drive traffic to this product and see if users are remotely interested
- Example: Here's how Hubstaff did it - Link
ii. Drive relevant users to it
Your landing page, newsletter or white-label product needs relevant user traffic. Here's how you build it:
- Social media posts: An obvious one, but here are the key points
- Find which platform your users frequent (don't spray and pray)
- Tweak the content according to the platform. For e.g.
- Tweet threads work best on Twitter
- LinkedIn requires content that isn't dense
- Detailed tutorial of each platform to be covered in a future post
- Relevant communities: Top platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn are great, but reaching your users is easier on platforms that cater to your niche.
- Don't start pitching your product. Instead, initiate and engage in fruitful conversations related to your product
- Example of platforms
- Hackernews for tech (dev-focused)
- Indiehackers for entrepreneurship
- Dev.to for developers
- Bravado for sales
- Makerpad for no-code
- Remote Clan for remote workers
- Paid ads: This (clearly) costs money. But specifically for a landing page or a white-label product, this makes a lot of sense. You can:
- Direct the exact target audience to your product
- Be sure that they actually have the intent of purchasing such a product/service
- Calculate the exact cost of user acquisition
- Example: Here's how GrowthMentor did it - Link
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