But reading between the lines it's obvious that the major problem in most cases was lack of demand or inability to market the product.
So I'd be interested hear what and how you do early demand validation for your side project or idea, if any?
Share your story.
* Make it open source
* Give it away for free
It's not the golden rule that will work for everything. But that's what I did with Lunar, my app for controlling monitors (https://lunar.fyi) and it helped enormously with adoption and with seeing if a large enough user base could be created.
A lot of users offered to donate, others told me that I was stupid for not asking money for the app, others constantly asked for features on Github which helped me understand how the product could solve the problem better.
In the end, I prepared a large update with most of the features that were requested and made those features paid while keeping the old version free and open source.
99% of the users applauded this decision and were happy to pay (the other 1% sweared angrily through emails, but what can you do..)
A friend’s kid asked me for some advice about his startup. It is a SAAS in the elder care space; he’d developed it for his grandmother and had a few friends using it as well.
He asked this same question (except it wasn’t a side project). I suggested, “If you can get 50 people whom you don’t already know to use this product for more than a month then you might have a winner.”
The three keys here are:
1 - more than a month meant they actually found it useful. For his SAAS it would imply they’d stick around after a starter period month.
2 - people he didn’t know: his friends and their parents might take extra effort to use it. He had to find people with actual need
3 - 50 is arbitrary but not terrible; a dozen or so doesn’t tell you a lot while 250 probably doesn’t tell you a lot more than 50 or 75
In the past six months he’s tweaked his product based on feedback from this effort and has gotten into the high 20s.
That said, business value goes up exponentially when it earns the First Dollar, a sale to someone with no existing connection to tue company or anyone in it. Very rarely is First Dollar sale so unique or edge-casey that there aren't dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of prospects that have the same problem and would buy for the same reasons.
TLDr - if you want to make some money start by selling to friendlies. If you want to validate a business that may be able to grow by leaps and bound, focus on the first dollar.
Get one of those first, then open your terminal. Aside from showing there is a non-zero market for your wares, it also proves that you are willing to do the hard part which is the selling, not the building.
If you won't do the hard part then you are wasting your time. So do the hard part once first.
- they're being nice to you
- they think in that very moment they would but in a real situation they wouldn't
In my experience, reducing "value risk", which OPs question is essentially about, has to happened incrementally. So build something small and then try to sell it to someone. Work with them to improve the product and then try to sell it more people and so on.
The veed.io blog has some nice articles with great insight into this topic: https://www.veed.io/blog/
Someone literally handing you money for your thing kinda invalidates a lot of other processes, theories, etc.
You forgot that one: - they would actually buy it
> In my experience, reducing "value risk", which OPs question is essentially about, has to happened incrementally.
That does seems to be the goal of the question... you reduce the risk. You can't be sure it's perfect, like every single step of validation, but you do reduce the risk. That's true because it's still possible they answer "no".
I think it's also extremely important because of the point of OP:
> it also proves that you are willing to do the hard part which is the selling
This is the biggest issue with a big majority of people on Hacker News. We are good a building, not selling. Which is also a big reason why it's pretty useful to find another founder that would fill theses lacks of experiences.
That’s actually an excellent point. Selling is an underrated form of art and essential for any successful venture.
> Adobe’s $1bn acquisition of Frame.io took many in the industry by surprise [1]
I am surprised. Perhaps this is a case of me not talking to enough people, or maybe people really don’t know what they want until you show it to them.
[1] https://www.ibc.org/trends/what-frameios-1bn-sale-says-about...
I also pondered starting building a company and tools for filmmaking and bailed out, and I’m glad I did. My background is CG & VFX, so not editing exactly, but talking to people in VFX helped my business partner and I see that VFX software is thin margins, super competitive, and not a good long term strategy in the US.
Anyway, the success of frame.io could still mean your takeaway was correct that editors don’t want many cooks in their personal kitchen, but also that your view of collaborative editing could have been widened into include a broader range of collaborative activity. In some sense, pro filmmaking is almost always highly collaborative already, not with multiple editors, but definitely with multiple people.
Another possibility is that frame.io doesn’t resonate with editors, but does resonate with many other people making films, ads, social media videos, movies, etc. It might not be the editors that are buying it. It also might not be experienced filmmakers buying it either; one problem with interviewing the experts is that they rarely understand the markets for non-experts…
Many users of google docs don’t use private docs or the enterprise version.
[0]
The key is knowing who your target customer is and solve for them [0]. Then, you are in a good place where you either fire ones who aren't [1] or change your solution (rather, start with a burning, hair-on-fire problem your target customer has, not solutions) [2].
Typically in a b2b setting, one starts out by addressing all needs (must-have) of their target customer as opposed to their wants (good-to-have). That is, other customers whose wants are NOT your target customers needs, you do not address them in the early stages of the product development [3]; and price / position [4] the product accordingly [5].
When changing the solution, figure out if there's another much bigger adjacent problem, that you weren't paying attention to [6], staring you down [7].
[0] https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done
[1] https://www.michaelseibel.com/blog/users-you-don-t-want
[2] https://www.ycombinator.com/library/8g-how-to-get-startup-id...
[3] https://apenwarr.ca/log/20211024
[4] https://hackernoon.com/obviously-awesome-a-product-positioni...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_mix#Lauterborn's_4_C...
[6] http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html
[7] https://tomblomfield.com/post/33506878578/making-something-p...
Take an actual payment. Even if it's for vaporware (that you can eventually deliver on and that's properly messaged).
1) Find niche subreddits where people that are your target audience hang out, observe communities, help people out, participate in the discussion, if someone has a problem that your product can solve, then help them out in the comments and see what their feedback is
2) Learn a bit of SEO - you don't need to be an expert to fix some low-hanging fruits and get your product in front of people who might be using search engines to find a solution for their problem. Downside: SEO can take a few months to a year to kick-in, so if you have a very short time-window, it might not work immediately
3) Create a landing page and a sign-up list - see how many people sign up
4) Find bloggers and community members that write about your topic, cold email them telling them about your product. Be prepared for the response rate to be pretty low, but it can work.
5) LinkedIn - ok, ok I know I might get downvoted for this, but imho LinkedIn still has some of the best organic reach of any social platform, so you might as well use it to post about your product (esp. if it is a B2B one)
FYI - for consumer tech products, willingness to use something doesn't equate to willingness to pay for something, which you have to account for when doing research.
Here is an example: https://old.reddit.com/r/Denver/comments/qshpov/i_started_ma...
522 votes and 51 comments on a relatively small subreddit put it in near the top for a day or two. Idea validated.
My experience has been that reddit is great for validation. Traffic and kudos. Compliments and constructive critique. But almost no traffic from reddit resulted in people willing to sign up and pay money.
Now, admittedly, I sold my profitable side project a couple years back. Maybe the trends have changed - so I'm curious whether reddit users are now actually potential customers, or is it still just good for traffic?
This part is important. I’ve been caught out on Reddit sharing things I’ve built, expecting a “Show HN” type of response but shot down for promoting a product. Unlike here, most people on Reddit aren’t builders and mods tend to have a heavy hand for anything promotional (even if it’s free and you think it’s useful).
I think my audience is the type that prefers it if you pick up the phone and have a conversation with them, or email them, or write them a letter. So that’s what I did. I had lots of conversations with lots of people. I tried to build relationships to make sales, and the validation part only came when the customer actually paid money.
I tried the build almost nothing and throw up a fake credit card form like some people suggest, but it didn’t work. I know it works for some people, but it didn’t work for me.
Edit: One thing that helps is if your widget is a good-enough replacement or alternative for something that people are already buying for 10x the price of your widget. Even if your widget kinda sucks (it will! it does!), people will be so happy that they're saving 10x of their $$$ that they won't mind your widget's flaws... and they'll enthusiastically tell you which flaws matter and which ones don't, so you know how to improve it in the future.
tl;dr: 1) Pick a widget category where you can make a thing 10x cheaper than the competition. 2) Get a customer. 3) Talk to them. 4) Take notes.
But the real moment is getting a specific person to actually give you money, hopefully before you put in too much work on the experiment. Promises or "that sounds cool" won't do it, you have to prove it to yourself by getting a person to give you real money for your thing, that's the only way to really know.
I decided to try selling it, even though I was 100% confident that no one would buy it. During the first couple of days I’d also overpriced it, because I didn’t want anyone to buy it before I’d had the chance to fix a couple of bugs.
To my surprise (and frankly, shock) people were buying it. I was sure that requests for refunds would start rolling in immediately due to the aforementioned bugs, but they didn’t. I eventually lowered the price and even made it free, because the money was immaterial to me and I’d already learned my lesson from this project. (I also felt guilty for not setting up the infrastructure to ship updated versions to buyers, so I took solace in the fact they could get them for free on their own.)
I might go back to it, but the product is seasonal and doesn’t create recurring revenue so I’ll more likely be focusing on other things.
I’ve never had a project that hasn’t generated at least some excitement in the relevant community, so I might just have a knack for these things. Too bad I only just realized I could’ve been making some money from it!
Like you might start with one data point ("hey, it's really annoying when I try to do X" or there are a couple posts in online forums from people describing problem X).
Then you get more data (see if more people have that problem, talk to the users on forum posts about their specific needs, find out where potential users hang out and how many people might have this problem).
Then maybe you build something simple to address the needs and see if people are interested / use it / pay for it (landing page or minimum valuable product).
Then you get feedback from the initial users about what they're really needing and iterate lots of times to get it right while figuring out where and how to market/distribute.
Throughout this process there's an increasing sense of confidence that you're on the right track (or not).
But also sometimes you build something just because and it turns out that lots of people like it (Minecraft). But the risk of wasting a lot of time and effort is a lot higher without continuous feedback.
The second step is to field your solution and see if people are happy with the problem you've solved. Marketing is also a concept far too often underestimated or overlooked on HN. For instance, I wrote some software based on complaints from a very specific diy agriculture subreddit. Once I reached a bare minimum MVP I posted it on reddit, people were excited because a cool tech thing solved a problem they had. They shared with their non-internet friends and orders / emails started steadily flowing in. Unfortunately, the time/revenue ratio wasn't good enough and I basically broke even on the project.
That said, think about the problem deeply before spending valuable time "validating" what might be a solution nobody actually needs.
Im my experience using Buffet’s approach to investing works well. Invest in good companies at a fair price and not in fair companies at a good price.
That means that the problem will usually have a higher cost to solve (time, effort, money).
Now, this is my opinion. Take it with a grain of salt. In the end, a focused approach to problem finding tends to work best.
I felt a need for something like this as a surfing student: I was booking classes via messaging/phone.
A few years go by and I forget about it, but recently I meet the owners of two surfing schools who tell me about the need for a such a booking system.
Trying to launch soon.
Hope this counts as validation.
I'm currently developing a similar platform for music practice space (https://noisycamp.com).
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Rocketshipping-accelerated-thinking-S...
My first business was selling coffee. I put a coffee machine on a metal table, put some pallets around it. Some dude came and asked for an espresso. He said it was too small and tasted nasty. I told him I'd refund that and give him a latte, which was 8 times bigger than an "espresso". He refused and gave me money anyway. He was later a daily customer after the first latte though. More people came and we sold 100 cups on the first day. Did we do marketing? Yes, we told the people staring at us that we'd give them a full refund if they didn't like it. Nobody took the refund.
My first real startup was a recipe app with an ingredients store. People just went to the store and clicked "add to cart". I did not expect them to. We didn't have a dashboard for viewing orders (nor a cart, the purchase button just took their phone number and address). I hacked something that put together a cart on the dashboard, then I'd contact them on WhatsApp and give my bank account details (we didn't have a payment gateway either).
The hard part is often the product. If you have bad lattes, nobody's going to order another. If you don't have recipes for flaxseed flour, not that many people are going to order the flaxseed flour.
I'd say don't listen too hard to entrepreneurship gurus who tell you to "validate before writing a single line of code". Often the code is part of the validation. I tried to run ads for flaxseed flour and nobody bought it. There's a niche for it, and that niche was overadvertised by other sellers. Writing the code exposed us to a marketing flank we never knew existed, and the app was eventually acquired as a diet food marketing channel, because the CAC was lower than Facebook ads.
You can build something of value and give that for free. That's actually a little easier than trying to go the validation route. From there, you can use the feedback to pivot into something of higher value or is more monetizable (e.g. DLCs). Metallica didn't think they'd make money off music, so they started with t-shirts.
There's been a couple cases where that simple amount of initiative plus about a half day of work, the resulting feedback was enough of a push to overcome hesitations my friends' had in starting a company.
And if your project is in a niche area, then it probably not help at all.
I setup a landing page and in the last 6 months I’ve had less that 100 visits and no interactions with any of the call to actions; even with paid advertisements on linked in and google.
Search for your problem on google. If the top results are blogspam with ads for monetization, that's a bad sign. Are there existing products in the niche and are they doing well? Is there a lot of search volume for related keywords? Do you have a better or unique understanding of the niche that others lack?
Look for microtraction, and then experiment as much as possible.
Fyi: yes, some experience building websites for others is required.
In my case small SAAS app for business folk.
Surely there’s spots on the web for this?
1) Where do people that have use for your app hang-out or post about the problem that your app solves? Are there any online forums or subreddits or facebook groups where your target audience is? If so, I would join these communities and when someone has a problem that your product solves, I'd help them in the comments and point to your product. Many groups are (for a good reason) hostile to adposts, so your best bet would be to spend time and engage with the community as opposed to going for direct adposts immediately.
2) Post on LinkedIn (consistently) using keywords / hashtags that target your customer base. Use infographics or tutorials of your product to showcase how it solves a problem. I know LinkedIn can be a pain, but imho it has one of the best organic reaches of any big social media platform and it's free (apart from the time it takes to write and post).
If you hope to get customers - You're thinking about it wrong. First, the typical buyer doesn't trawl a "SaaS Apps" list site looking for services they need. Second, even when you list on a site like Product Hunt, the chances are low that any given visitor that sees your site the day it's promoted also needs your service. Instead, think about what search terms someone might use on Google when they have (or are about to have) the problem your SaaS app solves. Try and write the best answer on the web for those searches.
If you hope to get feedback - Again, probably thinking about it wrong. I'd try finding people who A.) You don't know and B.) Are uniquely qualified to give feedback on your service, and get in touch with them, try and offer something of value to them in exchange for feedback.
2. find if any products exist to solve the problem. If there are a few of them, try to guesstimate the market size. Mostly likely, there is a market for that if the number is ok. If there are many existing players, there is no need to validate because obviously there are many competitors in the field.