Ask HN: How do you validate your startup idea when you've no distribution?
Hello HN,
Wondering how people with almost no distribution channel manage to validate their ideas!
I've built and published many apps throughout school without validating the idea, but they received 20K+ installs in a short span.
After reading tons of books and articles, I realized people validate their ideas before spending too much time on them.
So I decided to build a landing page with a waitlist for my product and posted it on Twitter and Instagram.
Though a lot of people I spoke to sounded "excited", I got very few signups. (They're not my target audience, so I didn't ask them if they'd pay for such a product)
Now I'm wondering if my idea is bad or if my distribution is awful.
What am I doing wrong?
(P.S I'm working on a creator SaaS product)
73 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadIf you're trying to prove a value proposition, I find that a survey works better than a landing page. PowerPoint decks work too. You can do something similar without being deceptive. Or you can just go to a subreddit of your target market and see what's popular or what people are complaining about.
Have you read The Mom Test? Here's a summary: https://www.slideshare.net/xamde/summary-of-the-mom-test
I recommend reading the book.
Here's a good example:
> Though a lot of people I spoke to sounded "excited", I got very few signups. (They're not my target audience, so I didn't ask them if they'd pay for such a product)
Those people weren't in your target audience, and you didn't ask them to pay, but I presume you take it as a positive sign that this particular audience was "excited." But it's not. It's not anything since they're not even potential customers. That's how we subtly deceive ourselves.
Talk directly to people in your target audience (contact on social, then move convo to email, then move convo to telephone) and try to get them to put some skin in the game. One popular tactic is to offer a free feature request for a refundable prepayment.
He started out describing a proposed product and asking if people would be interested and buy it. "YES", no question they liked the idea and would pay money for it. So he went and built it. No takers, lots of "maybe later"s.
After a few rounds of that losing game, he started asking not what they wanted, but about specific pain points - 'What is most inconvenient about this?', 'does this task consume too much of your time?', 'what is the biggest time-waster?', etc.. When he listened and built products addressing the complaints, he'd make sales on the first call, even tho no one ever actually told him they were interested.
I'd suggest for OP to design a question list around things solved by the proposed product, and related work. Do not tell them that you are working on a product. Talk to prospects and see if those are true pain points - and try to get them to say they're just fine - avoid politeness & confirmation bias (i.e., you really don't want to fall for a few ppl being nice, agreeing that it's a problem, then building something they don't care about}.
So, if you try to convince them that there is no problem, and they insist that there are no workarounds, they've searched and it's a PITA that costs them money, then you are on to something.
Edit: typos
The parent comment is right. There are two useful outcomes - they are willing to take their credit card out, or they are willing to give you direct feedback. Everything else is noise.
Recipe to spend $1000s marketing dollars vs $10,000s of development hours to validate ->
(1) Think hard about exactly who your target customer is and how your product would be received.
(2) Use google ad planner or FB's audience tool to see how accessible that audience is online, along with projected CPC costs
(3) If you are super budget constrained scour the internet for free adwords / fb advertising credits eg - https://www.diydigitalstrategy.com/150-google-ads-coupon/ - many online marketing classes will come with a $100 - 150 coupon
(4) Build a landing page framework WITH pricing on the landing page (or a pricing range eg $XX a seat with team discounts). Both FB & Goog are anti "waiting lists" so you need to think about how to get around this. Consultative sales, eg a "Somebody from our sales team will be in touch" doesn't break their TOS as long as you do a good job following up with the customers
(5) Spend the money on the validation and get the added bonus of talking to some very early preliminary customers that are NOT in your orbit
I think in general if you're honest with yourself, you have a decent chance of evaluating your idea's desirability. Go with the YC mantra of "Make something people want". If you are scratching your own itch, that could be a good way to start.
"Creators" are a fickle bunch so not always the best audience.
Once you do this, the creators will spread the product for you if it's good. Being a creator is all about collaboration so they are used to this in terms of the products they use and sharing those products with their peers (and communities)
In terms of distribution, this is a relatively easy one to solve. The classic: Figure out who your customer is and talk to them, you have it easy in that your customers are TRYING to be visible.
source: I'm an athlete with > 100k IG followers
The problem with landing pages, waitlists, etc is that they'll give you very little - until people are using your product everything they say is suspect. They need to be using your product, be vested in it, care about it, have opinions about it, etc. Landing pages will only get you a "huh, that's interesting, I might try it out"
To validate it, find several dozen people that will use and love it and give you real feedback. This is a highly manual process and it should be.
Customers are often irrational, especially with the current heavily manipulated monetary system. I only want to work on products that are beneficial for users (in a meaningful, long term way), even if people might not understand the benefits today (and it might not sell at all).
Bootstrapping (unlike VC funding) allows you to wait out the insanity instead of forcing you to profit from it. If you have a good product, people will come to their senses sooner or later - You will get steady, linear growth but it will be solid growth.
Most of the time, exponential growth is fickle. Users got overexcited, they made an impulsive decision; the next phase is disillusionment.
Figure out who your target audience is first. You might have to talk to a lot of people. Get good at listening and asking open ended questions ( see book Mom Test )
Once you have a rough idea who your audience is, try to find about 30 people in that audience to talk to face to face. You can use a script like in the book Running Lean. You want to keep good notes on each conversation. Build a table/matrix of all things you uncover across these 30 or so conversations. If you can see a clear pattern in the problems a majority of the people have, that could be the idea you build a product for.
Why not build something you would pay for? It would give you more drive to deeply care about making the product happen.
If you choose an audience you are part of then you are less likely to end up hating the end product.
Building to scratch your own itch carries the risk of you inadvertently building for an n of 1.
Most of the replies here seem applicable only to products offering new capabilities, as opposed to products intending to be better implementations in existing categories.
The problem I see is I can say, "My product is like X except it's more usable/efficient, less buggy, and looks nicer," —but they'd have to take each of those claims purely on faith, so it's not very useful.
Thinking about it more, maybe it's impossible by definition to pre-validate this kind of product: your offering is strictly in the implementation (not some abstract new feature concept), so the validation has to take place with respect to concrete details of the product's realized form.
Maybe the best you can do is take this into account when devising strategy around the ordering of features to develop: e.g. if your claims are on usability or performance, focus on that first.
(Then again, seems dubious since most all of the example qualities I mentioned are sort of emergent from the entire product being in place, can't really develop them in isolation...)
Any thoughts?
If you answered yes then you just need to leap and iterate on the user feedback loop.
My first mvp compared to what I'm selling today is completely different. I pivoted 20 times at least.
So the name of the game is to just start building and not be overly concerned with making mistakes. Find what doesn't work and move toward what does. Mimic nature by constant evolution.
The question was how to get the users and their feedback in the first place.
Distribution IS part of a startup idea. It’s an essential ingredient. Don’t think about idea and distribution as separate things. If you can’t find your target audience to validate your idea with, you have an incomplete startup idea, by definition!
If you are unsure how to find your target audience today, building your product will not fix this problem. Speaking to real users should be a higher priority than building or planning features.
For advice on speaking to users I only recommend one short book - “The Mom Test”. In that book you will learn why “excitement” is a very misleading signal. There is a good reason why YC partners constantly recommend it.
Once I get rudimentary version, I can then put it out there in public to validate it. Maybe do a Show HN or do a 'low budget' Ad on Facebook/Twitter. This is what I did for my current project, https://nocommandline.com (I did a Show HN).
I feel that software needs a 'trial' version to be able to gauge whether people will actually use it or not.