How do you validate an idea before you build it? Sell it | Hacker News Reader

How do you validate an idea before you build it? Sell it

12 pointsn_coats6 comments

I recently identified a market opportunity for a startup that I am interested in pursuing. Having made the mistake in previous ventures of building first and then realizing that no one wanted to pay for what I built, I promised myself to always validate new ideas to be sure someone would actually buy when it's finished.

Slightly thrown off at first, I had to think about how to validate. In the past I designed a few mock-ups or landers and counted the amount of users that stayed on the check out page for more than X minutes. I would post it on boards or forums where my target market conversed and see what happened.

Knowing how much it sucks when you realize no one will buy what you've spent the last 6 months bringing to life, I decided against my previous methods and spent the last two days going from business to business selling my software prior to writing one line of code. I was honest and told all potential clients that the software is not built but will be in a month (enough time for me to build it). I offered businesses a 50% lifetime discount if they enroll in the presale today.

It started out rough, but I quickly dialed my pitch and was able to sell what I haven't yet built. I learned more about my market and some of the problems and needs my customers have. I've decided the sale I made and the overall response and interest is enough to go for it and build the software. Once it's done I've already got one customer and multiple leads who admitted they would like to try the service out once built.

Have you waisted a lot time and effort building for no one before?

How have you validated ideas prior to bringing them to market? What seemed to work and what didn't?

For http://www.pixtulate.com (on the fly cropping and scaling of responsive images) we simply read lots and lots of blogs from the responsive web design community. We eventually narrowed down on a problem everyone was discussing and was trying to build various home grown solutions to.

After reading all the great posts by Jason Grigsby (http://blog.cloudfour.com/) the problems with sending one-size-fits-all images to mobile and tablet devices was obvious. Additionally, most existing solutions require you to pre-scale/crop multiple versions of the same image which is tedious and labor intensive. Even the proposed srcset attribute and picture element have this requirement.

Next, we looked at any existing players in the space and found that a few where starting to crop and getting traction which further validated our premise that people where looking for a robust solution.

So, we considered it worth at least building an MVP and will soon be looking for interested parties to try it out (drop me a line if interested - and yes, our site is butt ugly).

I got my current start (granted not super successful, just started about a month ago) with my product paying all my bills by looking for an audience and just selling manual services that emulated the product itself. Once I saw secured actual contracts and demand, I built it.

In my case, I used a few different marketplaces, but I might also recommend competitor's forums.

Just go to where your audience frequents and sell them something, and if they pay for it, build it.

Some of this might be considered spam, but I would imagine if you did a bit of research or attempted to explain how you add value in some way: I'm sure people don't mind direct emails or direct messages (if something exists)

With that, I'd recommend stuff like linkedin/twitter etc to find relevant people in the industry you want to sell to and work from there.

Well done, good idea to offer the service in dosage manually and then identify what needs to be streamlined!

Yes, we once had a more or less finished base product. But at that time my co-founder had to start doing sales so he shited his pants and suddenly invented a whole new addition that would surely sell.

I worked my ass off, and in the end when it was released, it turned out more than 90% of people only use the base product.

I think I'm still mentally recovering from that one and it it was the initiator for the spoiled relationship with the co-founder.

It takes courage to contact people, ask for a meeting and tell them what your plans are.

But it beats spending months working on something no one wants.

And every time you do it, it takes less courage.

Sorry to hear about your experience. I've felt your pain and it can be terribly discouraging. Couldn't agree more with your thoughts.

Did you actually take credit card Pre-orders? There is a line that actually forking cash over crosses.

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