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Ask HN: How much interest needed before idea is valid?

14 pointscoryl20 comments

Hello friends,

Curious to know how much interest or evidence of customer interest is needed before an idea is valid. Kind of a silly question I know, but here's the situation.

I'm researching a product that already exists and serves a market. It is software thats given away free by big companies as a complimentary service to help their customers. Now here's the opportunity: I've found people interested in using the same software, but do not want to pay the fees associated with using the big companies main services. I could develop the software and charge for it, helping people save money by avoiding the big company's costs and getting what they want.

In my research, I've found at least 14 forum posts (however, some of which are a year old) from different forums, looking for the same kind of software solution. Nobody has produced a solution to handle this exact problem aside from the big companies. But here's the tricky part: the technology already exists in other 3rd party products, just simply not directed as this particular market. It is simply a matter of adapting existing products to fit the market.

There are a couple other factors that limit immediate growth; for example, the software fits extremely well into complimenting the big companies' main offering. Since I'm not interested in competing with their main product, I cannot offer the convenience or security that their integrated systems do. That means there are switching costs. But for now, I probably shouldn't be concerned about this.

So anyway, I've got 14 forum posts and I assume there are more out there that I've yet to find. Is the idea validated yet, or do I need to find more people asking for the same thing? I am currently trying to get into IM / skype contact with some of these customers to gather more information. Would it be a bad idea to dry test this as well? My concern is that it is fairly low barrier, and any hope of success requires a first mover with fast execution. A dry test may only alert others. I'm usually not paranoid about keeping ideas secret; but this software has been around for at least 4 years, its just that nobody has created a 3rd party offering for it (and maybe for good reason).

Appreciate your help and comments. Thanks

Here's my advice but you won't like it: At this very early stage nobody can give you much advice, you should go buy your gut. Nobody can tell you if 14 as opposed to 20 or 50 forum posts is the threshold. As in art, if you're always asking if your creations are "art", then you are not ready.

Apart from that, I would say that if your idea is so reliant to the first mover advantage, it may not be worth pursuing, there will always be copycats, you should be ready to fend them off. I say, go with the dry run and don't worry too much about it.

You're right about the copycats, I tend to sway back and forth between objectivity and fearfulness, but your mentioning of copycats was right. I don't really know if theres a such thing as a first mover in this space, after all, I'm just taking existing software and offering it cheaper.

Buy a domain ($8), create a new website at weebly.com (free), and build a few pages describing your product, benefits and add an order page for however much you want to sell it for. Don't capture any billing details and say that you're in Beta and anticipate to launch later.

Buy $500 worth of adwords to drive traffic to your site for a week. See how many conversions you'd make theoretically based on the users who pass the order page.

From there you'll know if it's a profitable idea or not.

I'm familiar with the model, I'll probably do it. Except for the $500 part. EEK, thats a lot of money for an experiment.

$50 then. Adwords is great like that.

Think about that again: if you're a software developer $500 is like what, 5 hours worth of work? You only get one chance to validate this, so you'd better do it right. After you've spent $10000 or more in development time is not a good time to find out your product idea is fundamentally flawed.

I'm in the process of doing this myself. I was wondering if there's any framework to help with creating these kinds of pages? Like a Wordpress template for doing these kinds of product pages or A/B tests?

Ask yourself what's the Minimum Viable Product? How long would it take you to produce it? Would you learn anything by producing it or would it enhance your CV/portfolio? Would you enjoy producing it? If it doesn't sell could you open source it and either gain some reputation for yourself or help some people out?

Maybe it's worth just doing it regardless of market size/opportunity?

I agree with these questions. How much would it take to build the MVP? If it's not much, I say go for it.

However, if the MVP will take a long time/money to build, I suggest testing the market before you even build it.

Is there a way for you to contact potential buyers? Can you talk directly to them? Can you set up a landing page that explains this product and drive traffic to it?

If you can contact 20 potential customers and pitch your product, that would be great. You'd get an idea of whether they'd buy it or not. Maybe they wouldn't due to a problem you aren't seeing.

If 1/20 want to buy it, maybe it's not such a good idea.

The first thought that popped into my mind after reading your question is about protecting your market. If you expect this product to be highly profitable and these other companies already distribute the software with other services, they might wise up and sell it as a separate service. If they were to unleash a feature-rich product on you with their brand image, you may find it difficult to handle. That being said, the fact that they have not done this already might imply that it's not highly profitable. That might be ok for you if you just want to have a smaller-scale profit with a niche audience.

My second suggestion is simply to talk to people, find anyone and everyone who might be slightly interested and see if you can shoot them a personal email, tweet, etc. Most people who would get value out of what you offer would be happy to hear from you at least once. I've been doing the same with my side-project, Sparkmuse, and the responses have been both extremely helpful and surprisingly interested.

Take a day and make a video pitch. Nothing terribly complicated, just sketch out some things on a whiteboard and provide some narration (even stick figures if you must). Communicate clearly about what the product is, what problem it solves.

Take that video pitch and e-mail it to the 14 forum posters along with a very personalized cover msg. Use that as an intro to start talking one-on-one with them about developing the features.

The "idea" isn't "validated" until you've made a successful exit (or whatever your ultimate goal is). Until then, you need to be talking to customers every day, most of the day, continually validating everything from the featureset to the tagline to the placement of each button.

Interesting concept, I like the idea of using video, it gives it a human touch.

What I might do in addition is record the video/pitch, embed it onto the homepage of my dry test, and underneath it include a textform to let them immediately let me know what they think and how to contact them. What do you think about that?

Exit? The idea isn't validated before you leave it?

You say it's a low barrier, build something and try and promote it. The worst that can happen is it fails and you 'nuke the site from orbit'.

You already have a bunch of forums on which you can promote it. You also have a list of companies that might be persuaded to pay you, or buy you out.

If they can easily write this software themselves, and bypass you, then maybe you're right to be scared, and you really don't have much.

It's hard to be any more specific with this vague a question. Good luck though!

Don't forget that people who are looking don't necessarily mean they will commit. Steve Blank liked asking people if they'd use it right away if it was free. It can save you a lot of heartache later.

But won't everyone say yes to something free?

Do you have an account on every free website you've come across?

I'm a bit confused about what Steve Blank was asking. Was he asking potential users if they'd use the service right away if it was free? What does this question prove exactly? I'm thinking, if they were targeted in the dry test, they'll probably say yes. So I'm not sure if there's more to this question than was posted, if anyone knows please reply.

I took your comment a little bit out of context to make a point - that just because something is free, doesn't mean everyone will use it.

To expand a little bit further, sometimes people see value in expensive stuff just because it has a high price tag.

No. Simply because there is a cost involved with deployment, seeding initial data, training, and then getting data back out if they didn't like it.

These people are usually busy people running their businesses. There was a Mixergy interview with LessAccounting where they said that people searching for "Quickbooks replacement" on Adwords were not sufficiently motivated to replace Quickbooks. The revenue earned from Adwords covered a third of the costs.

In Steve Blank's "4 steps to Epiphany", the enterprise customer who was a apparently close to buying (according to Sales VP). Eventually, when this question was asked... "if it was free, will you deploy it straight away?" the answer came back as "no, because it was not urgent, etc".

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