Ask HN: Validate my idea
The idea is: Digital guestbook
For example you run a restaurant, museum or any other place. You register to my service, get a short link to your guestbook and a QR code. Your visitors can visit the website and leave a comment, even a handwritten signature through their smartphone's touchscreen. Another alternative is that you can find the place on your smartphone browsing the nearly places based on your gps location.
And no, it's not like Yelp because it aggregates places, mine will give you a private page with the reviews from your visitors.
So, what do you say?
7 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 27.5 ms ] threadTo actually validate this idea, you need a few things. (Note: if all you want to do is build something for fun, then you don't need to validate anything at all! Building it for fun should be enough. Just don't expect anything more out of it, and if you decide to productize it, expect to start over from scratch.)
First, get rid of everything after "The idea is: Digital guestbook". Everything after that is way too specific. You need a hypothesis you can test, and your hypothesis is "Is there market interest for guestbooks, but digital."
Second, asking strangers here, in this way, isn't helpful. It's not providing true validation. This isn't any better than asking friends and family what they think of your idea. None of the data you get out of this (or asking your friends/family) is valid. It can't be used to support a business case.
To actually validate your idea, you need to start by making a list of places where companies already use guestbooks. The last time I saw a guestbook was a wedding. I can't remember the last time I saw one in a business. Find businesses that use a traditional, paper guestbook. Make a list of both the type of business (retail, restaurant, etc.) and the actual businesses name/location themselves.
Then, interview the business owners. Not a manager, not the cashier, but the owner, the person who is ultimately financially responsible for the entire enterprise. Ask them why they have a guestbook. Ask them what they get out of it. Ask them when they started having one and why. Ask them what they got out of it then and how that is different from what they get out of it now. Ask them about other ways they get information about their customers. Ask them to compare and contrast the utility of those methods with the guestbook. Ask them what kind of information they'd like to get from customers, but currently don't, or don't get well, or don't get easily.
Don't ask them about your digital guestbook idea at all.
Rather, interview enough business owners in different types of businesses until you start to see patterns emerging. This could be as few as a dozen interviews. This could also not be until you've interviewed a dozen people in each type of business. 2-3 is not enough, you need 8-12 people saying roughly the same thing, unprompted, on their own.
Once you have that consensus, then you can evaluate your "guestbooks, but digital" idea against it. Do "guestbooks, but digital" solve those problems?
No?
Then you were not able to validate your hypothesis. Don't pursue it.
Yes?
Then you need to see if businesses would pay you for digital guestbooks. Go back to those businesses. Present your understanding of the problem. Make sure it's correct. If it is, present how "guestbooks, but digital" solves that problem. Ask them to sign a check for $X. Do they sign a check?
No?
Then you were not able to validate your hypothesis. Don't pursue it.
Yes?
Then go build it and sell it.
That's the only true validation: will they cut you a check? That's the core part of MVP that people forget about: it's the minimum product that someone will pay for.
If they would, that's validation for your idea. If they wouldn't, you need to figure out if your solution is wrong, or if there's not a market there.
Good luck!
In this interview you are specifically looking to answer the following questions:
A. Customer Segments: Who has the pain? • How to identify early-adopters? Ask some introductory questions to collect basic demographics that you believe will drive how you segment and qualify your early adopters.
B. Problem: What are you solving? List (up to) the top 3 problem you believe you are solving • How does the interviewee rank the top 3 problems? • What is their pain level for all of these problems: must-have, nice-to-have, don’t-need? • How do customers solve these problems today? – This is generally the heart of the interview as they do a lot of talking and you ask follow up questions based on their responses.
You are done when you have interviewed at least 10 people and • can identify the demographics of an early adopter, • have a must-have problem and • can describe how customers solve this problem today
If you want to learn more about all of this I suggest picking up Ash Maurya's Running Lean - its the most actionable framework on the Lean Startup methodology that will walk you through step by step from validating your problem to actually having a viable business.
Hope that helps.