What is the best way to validate your idea?
Hello guys, I'm very new to this forum and I'd love to learn more about building saas business 🙂
I'm wondering, how do you validate your idea? And how do you get your product and idea in front of your potential customers?
I was thinking like: e-mail outreach, cold calling, groups and forums? Is there something else?
For ex. I was hoping to hop on a call with some digital agency owners to learn more about their pains and problems they're having..
But how do you actually create this group of "potential future clients" that might turn into your paying customers later on?
Thanks for any advise 🤙🏻
I'd recommend listening to this podcast (and buying The Mom Test book).
The reality is that it's a journey you need to figure out and experiment yourself and it will be different for everyone.
Thanks for that resource! I'll check it out.
I agree with you, it'll take a lot of failing and testing till I figure it out. I was also wondering what works for others 👍🏻
Thanks again for that podcast
@vedeus - I believe you can get a lot of false-positives when asking people for feedback about an idea you have. A lot of it has to do with how you talk to people about it.
In quickly looking at the The Mom Test podcast post, it seems to sum up rather well what I'm referring to above.
Also, contacting people and asking what their biggest pain points are, seems to be a solution in search of a problem approach.
One method I've seen used before, and something I've used indirectly, is to build either one or more pieces of content that talks about the problem (or pain points) that you believe you want to solve, but do NOT include anything about the solution you're considering creating.
Within the content, include all the other solutions that attempt to address the problem, but share where they fall short, and/or where they excel.
Build up either one very comprehensive piece of content, or several smaller pieces (like a series), then see if you can approach certain people that you believe may have the same problem, point them to your content, and then ask for their help/feedback.
Make sure they can provide feedback in a way where you have a good chance of being able to contact or reply to them. Like comments on an article, have people send feedback/thoughts through a Google Form, followers on a particular social account, or something similar.
Do that over a period of time, see what kind of validation or feedback you get, and then determine from there what your next steps are.
I've seen this done on Instagram before too, but I can't recall who did it. They created an IG account that had to do with a particular problem, shared content about the problem for at least a year, got a ton of followers, then when they launched their "solution" they already had built up trust of all of their followers. Those followers turned into customers.
While this post below is not about idea validation, it may be helpful as well:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/the-myth-of-interesting-bootstrappable-side-projects-with-great-business-potential-be47f5bb2c
Hope the above is helpful.