I've done this before, it also appears clearly described in the "Start small stay small book" which I recommend a lot. However after running it I found myself a little lost, conversion was not as expected and it's very hard to realize what failed. Is it the idea? or the design? or the speed of the website? or the wrong target audience? or the wrong keywords?.

More importantly should I jump to my next idea? or should I invest more time pivoting this one and pushing until I get where I want to be.

What happens when you're building an improved version of something that already exist? Would you skip this kind of validation assuming that if people pay for the big product they would pay for a small one? Specially if you're not aiming for a venture backed monster but just a bootstrapped small business.