We're not failing, but even from a (modestly) successful startup perspective, the vast gulf between "people who like to talk to you as if they will spend real money" and "people who will actually spend money" is painfully apparent.
You never know if someone is willing to pay until you ask them to open their checkbook.
The same theory can be applied to most investors. (pre-handshake protocol at least)
You throw up a cool pitch with some videos and vague promises, and watch the cash roll in. If the cash does indeed roll in, then it's a good idea!
Then you get to work, and hope no one remembers in 6 months that you promised to deliver them some amazing gifts. :-)
Avoid the confirmation bias of your peers, and target people actively looking for your idea.
Build a fake checkout that collects no data, and thank your 'paying' users for signing up to be notified when X goes on sale.
(You should also probably tell them that no financial information was actually stored.)
Kickstarter seems like a better approach, since everyone KNOWS there is no product to buy.
I still can't bring myself to do it, though.
Are you serious? That's a criminal act called fraud.
Please don't follow this advice. Just do something legal like having users sign up for a mailing list.
Much better to have PPC + landing page and a "tell me when this is available" signup.
Contrast that with polling a random sample of your target demographic, where any number of things can spoil the results. People could say they like the idea just to be polite. People could have never thought about the problem you're solving before, but think it's neat. People can misjudge how much they care about it. People can have an enthusiastic initial reaction, but think the idea is dumb on further reflection.
It's the same sort of problem with polling for election results: you can't ask a whole bunch of random people who they're going to vote for and turn the raw results into a pie chart. To get useful data, you have to carefully predict which of your respondents will actually turn up for the election, and which ones aren't going to change their mind between the time you poll them and voting day. And even then, in the end, it's not the pre-election polls that determine the new leader, it's the election itself.
That distinction is what's being presented here; asking a bunch of people is only useful if you're very careful about filtering out the junk answers. You should instead measure people who have already decided, without your prompting, that they have a problem and have decided to seek out a solution for it.
What you should be trying to find out is:
1. if they currently spend their money somewhere else to solve their problem
2. if your product is so much better at solving the problem, that they will want to switch.One click, a single click will not destroy you brand. And OP would've realized that no matter even with their best shot they couldn't get 10 clicks.
10 disappointed non-customers won't destroy your brand.
The problem is that the majority of first time founders are: (1) overly protective about their non-existent brand (2) afraid that they will not get any clicks (3) so attached to the idea that even if no one clicks, the design is to blame not the idea
This leads into spending far too much time not iterating on a broken realization of an idea, insisting that "with time it'll work out" or "just a little further, we're gaining momentum", when evidence shows that the company is actually at its worst :P
Okay i have a page and i HAVE to get people here with paid traffic like adwords because no one will write about my non-existent app.
So now I get a bit of traffic but nobody clicks the buy button...
Is it because i drew the wrong crowd? Is it because they don't know me? is it because adwords conversions are usually very low so do i need to pay for more traffic?
If it actually is because my product sucks, then cool.. But what do i change?
There is no way to know this; which is why i believe the buy button is not the way to go.... at the beginning.
You can still do this before you start building, but it must be done after talking to at least a few customers.
The traditional customer interviews are always the best way to start.
Firstly you can learn how other people describe the type of product you are offering - not necessarily how you describe it. With Adwords you'll see the types of keywords that people are typing to have your adverts displayed, some of these keyword phrases may include words you haven't considered. You then add these new words to your list and see the results. Rinse and repeat.
Now people are coming to your site you can track what they do. What price point has the most clicks, what wording bounces the least, etc.
I have done exactly what erikpukinskis described and it serves to not only validate (or not) your idea, but the great thing about this is I learned far more what real people are actually wanting, not what I thought they wanted.
A couple of weeks investing in a quick wordpress site and some adwords to validate and modify an idea before building is so much better then building it then seeing if they will come.
> Is it because i drew the wrong crowd? Is it because they don't know me? is it because adwords conversions are usually very low so do i need to pay for more traffic?
You don't just put up one ad using some keywords and be done with it. You constantly tweak, seeing what keywords people are using to find your ads, which keywords have the highest click through rate.
When I did this for a little idea I was thinking of doing, this was incredibly helpfu
The product I was think about doing was related to niche websites. I thought most people would use the word "niche" to describe them, it quickly became apparent that the real word people used was "affiliate" I saw "affiliate" appear a lot with related keywords and in the stats on the site, so I added an adword targeting that and related keywords, CTR doubled.
Using adwords helps you define and recognise the crowd you draw so you can best cater to them.
> If it actually is because my product sucks, then cool.. But what do i change?
Again, don't keep it static. In my experiment above, the first 100 clicks saw no interest. I changed some wording, a tiny improvement (less bounces etc). I changed the price, less bounces. I added FAQs, less bounces, I tweaked the available functions - possibly people would want feature X. Bang! people clicking on the "order now" button. Feature X is what people want
> There is no way to know this; which is why i believe the buy button is not the way to go.... at the beginning.
Seems like you haven't tried it, ;)
All im saying is - as i summed it up in the last line - you need to talk to customers before wasting adwords dollars.
What you describe is using adwors to find your audience. I guess there might be situations where that would be useful
> So we talked to a few artists who said they thought it was a cool idea. BOOM! Our idea had been validated!
The idea had not been validated at all, just been told it was "cool". What they should have done next (or possibly at the same time) is spend a couple of hundred dollars on adwords to see if a cool idea converted into something people would actually want to buy.
What they should not have done is
> stopped talking to artists for a year and built (and rebuilt) the software until we thought it was acceptable
My point is that I would far rather spend $200-$500 on adwords and not on 1 year development of a product that is thought to be cool, but no one has actually had the opportunity to come to it fresh and click on an "order now" button.
As for the advice of getting clicks, strongly product dependent.
Imagine you are a PaaS, say Heroku. It'd be a bit hard to adequately market such a product without convincing docs and people actually playing around with it. That is.. building the product.
And even if you could get some CC conversions, it still wouldn't validate the product because so much of the stick/not stick with it will come down to user experience. Which for a pretty technical product is a bit of an unknown.
stop worrying about what might happen, and do experiments to see what does happen.
ask people to buy and collect money. if they do, tell them it's not ready yet, do they want to wait, or do they want a refund?
S I M P L E S !
@startupjerkfest