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Show HN: A site to help you validate ideas in bulk

93 points by jamesskarzynski ↗ HN
Hi HN! I made a really quick web app to help people validate their ideas.

The app is a simple landing page builder, but every page includes a really simple Yes/No "Are You Interested?" poll.

Every vote is recorded and tracked, and if they click yes they are brought to a page where they can submit an email.

This makes validating ideas super easy because you can post your link to different communities and get statistically significant results as well as build an email list.

Given an hour, you could easily create 50 different landing pages and be able to validate your ideas in bulk.

The site (click Sign Up in top right - no cc needed): https://areyouinterested.co

Example landing page (Built in <60s): https://areyouinterested.co/site/pals-insurance

45 comments

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emosenkis
Looks cool! The pricing page doesn't include how long the free trial lasts and the $7 listed there doesn't match the $9 on the Stripe-hosted renewal page.
jamesskarzynski
Thanks! The pricing page should be updated now, thanks for letting us know!
hansdieter1337
How do you prevent people stealing other’s ideas? I feel it’s risky to post your possibly-millions-worth business idea in the Internet.
jamesskarzynski
You'll need to validate at some point! We don't publicly display any of our user's ideas, so your idea can stay as private or be as public as you want. If you just want to validate with a few people, just sent it to a few people!
benrbray
Everyone has ideas. Success is about execution. If your business model is threatened by someone merely hearing about it, you're doing something wrong.
jamesskarzynski
Totally agree. To add onto this, there are very few ideas that are so inherently new and valuable that simply hearing about them would cause someone else to launch into competition with you.
solumos
Similar to how companies rarely fail due to competition, ideas are rarely the sole reason for a company's success. "Stealing" an idea doesn't really happen unless someone else has the means and will to execute it.

The idea itself isn't really the hard part of building a company. Otherwise, people would be "selling" ideas, and not businesses[0]!

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html

tinalumfoil
"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." - https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Howard_H._Aiken

Also, the same skills required to come up with good ideas are probably the same skills required to make those ideas work. If you're experienced enough to know there's a need in some market, you'll only succeed if you have experience enough to develop and sell a solution. So, if someone successfully takes the market from under you they were probably already ahead of you even when you were first.

But the above quote is also why I'm skeptical of validating ideas in the landing page stage. The walkman was just as good as the iPod until I spent 5 minutes using the iPod, but no landing page would've convinced me.

amadeuspagel
I often see people asking how to think of startup ideas. Why wouldn't those people steal one?

The reason people sell businesses, not ideas, is precisely that it's so easy to steal ideas. So why buy one?

wtracy
Here's an idea: Make a pill that cures any viral disease! Don't bother me with questions about how to make it work. I'm an idea guy, not a chemist. Are you interested in the idea or not?

The reason people don't buy ideas is because ideas are worthless without execution. An idea with execution is already a business.

vladmk
you don't, you never tell anyone your idea or launch it, take it to the grave and keep it a huge secret like all the other amazing imaginary founders who did that. ;)
ghostbrainalpha
The danger of working on an idea that isn't properly validated is much greater than the danger of having good ideas stolen.

When I was a young environmentalist, I was very concerned with the problem of toilet paper waste.

I wasted hundreds of hours working on a reusable Loofah + Bidet system, it was a product that absolutely nobody wanted.

Are you laughing? Because its not a joke.

Tools like this one could have helped me move on to a better idea, and saved me a lot of time and heartache.

jamesskarzynski
I'm sorry to hear about that, but it is a really funny product idea looking back on it. Glad you see the value in our product!
tintor
Easy. Ask visitors to sign NDA first.
SMAAART
This is brilliant and it's the best example of MVP that I have seen.
jamesskarzynski
Thanks so much! I worked really hard on it and I was lucky to have some codebase that I could reuse from another project.
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cornychonay
Great idea. I think it'd be a really useful feature to be able to have yes/no data based on specific groups (this could easily be implemented via the URL, e.g. areyouinterested.co/pals-insurance?group=X). This would allow customers to dig deeper into which communities are (more) interested.
jamesskarzynski
This is a great idea! Right now this can be accomplished fairly easily by simply making a landing page for each group that you post in. For example, one of our users has 4 pages, with the slug of each ending with -{{group}}. This way you can collect emails and get vote info based on certain groups like you said.
xwdv
Sorry, but the answer to any business idea presented like this is going to be a hard no, despite however I may actually feel about the idea. Show me a working product with actual time and money and skill invested in it and then I’ll tell you if I’m interested.

The world is quickly becoming polluted with these validation-ware startups that are cowardly looking for ways to push risk onto the consumer, and the consumer is starting to wise up. Pretty soon, any new ideas are going to be met with skepticism and cynicism, even if there is a real product already made. Everyone wants money upfront, no one wants to just build shit and hope for the best anymore. Sometimes they even take your money and deliver nothing; how many people have been burned by kickstarters?

The end result of lean startup methods being practiced at massive scales is that it becomes harder for any startup to be taken seriously and it becomes harder for entrepreneurs to get real validation.

jamesskarzynski
Thanks for the input! Sorry you feel that way. I don't think I'd agree with your sentiment. I think it's a bad idea to build a whole product and spend potentially months or years before even knowing if people like your product.
xwdv
Bad for the startup that builds the wrong product, but good for the consumer.

Why should the consumer have to constantly suffer through a parade of fake ads for fake startups that don’t really know what consumers want and just want to try a bunch of things and see what shit sticks?

I used to buy stuff from Instagram ads, but now it’s littered with companies putting up ads for a bunch of random Chinese crap they can find on Ali Express and seeing what gets the most orders so they can ship it off to customers and then it turns out to be some piece of shit. Because of that I no longer pay attention to products advertised like that. This is the startup equivalent.

1123581321
In aggregate, consumers benefit from lower cost to bring products to market, which this is trying to do.

Personally, you may know a friend or family member who wasted a lot of time on a bad idea or possibly hurt themselves financially. Many people, like me, do. It hurts to see. So consumers benefit if their loved ones who are entrepreneurs can avoid making some bad business decisions by getting information earlier.

etherio
Looks cool! I think this could be really useful for determining which of the pile of ideas I have at the back of my head it would be useful to focus on.

Though, as someone else mentioned, I always have this fear of my idea getting stealed :). I know it's quite irrational, but well.

jamesskarzynski
Thanks! This is actually the reason I made it. I have about 50 ideas in the back of my head and don't want to muck about making a different site / validation flow for each one.
edoceo
This is neat but totally leads to false "validation". This is slightly better than just getting an email. Product Market fit (or even Problem Market fit) is more than someone just imagining their future best self as being interested.

True validation has the prospect part with something of value, real value, not just an email.

Like, give me $100 and I'll tell you how I've boot strapped a company now worth $4MM. Or I'll tell you how my previous company took $50k investment and grew to be worth $60MM.

Only folks really interested in the problem space would part with something of value today for a solution tomorrow.

jamesskarzynski
Sure, I can see that. But the application of this is such that you can expand it to include whatever sort of validation you need. When you get a list of people who imagine their future best self as being interested, you now have a list of people to whom you can more rigorously validate with. You can send them all an email asking for an interview, pre-order, etc. But regardless, this helps you build that initial list.
sjg007
Maybe sell the are you interested button? instead and manage the analytics.. I would want to run this from different domains.
jamesskarzynski
We were actually debating between this and the way we went. We are planning on adding custom domain support in the future!
sjg007
Yeah it would work well as a wordpress widget or weebly add on or a shopify something
CyberDildonics
I know people don't like to talk about astroturfing, but this is pretty blatant.

All these are four months old with only a few comments, yet have short generic positive comments here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=asadawadia

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=emosenkis

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=SMAAART

14 days old with one comment that is the same thing. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=xobetty

1 hour ago with the same type of comment https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cornychonay

First comment in 6 years to say "clever idea" https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dan301