
Ask HN: How to validate your market before building an MVP? - d--b
Hi all,<p>So everyone tells me that I should validate that there is a market for the product I want to build before committing a lot of time actually building the stuff.<p>But I find it really hard to have people really read my pitch?<p>I made a landing page explaining the product, along with some mock-ups of the app and tried the following:<p>1. Reaching out to about 200 people on LinkedIn (in my target) =&gt; got 20% of people accepting the connection, 0 people answered my message.<p>2. post it on HN =&gt; got 20 people on the site - 0 comment, 0 sign-ups<p>3. post it on specialized reddit groups =&gt; got almost no visit on the site.<p>4. Ask some friends what they thought about it =&gt; got great feedback, but of course these are biased...<p>So, I think that no-one actually looked at it.<p>I don&#x27;t blame anyone, cause I know I myself get bombarded by spam and have little time for myself, so I understand why people would skip it.<p>But then does anyone manage to validate the market before actually building? and if so how??
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Zelphyr
How did you go about picking those 220 people? Did you put together user
personas based on who your ideal customer is?

What questions did you ask these people? For example; you can't say, "How much
would you pay for this?" Your friends will tell you what you want to hear and
strangers will, as often as not, say some variation of "It should be free!"

Also, it's really hard for people to understand an idea based on a pitch.
You'll have a lot more success if you can put a prototype in their hands and
watch how they use it and note what kinds of questions they ask.

My company built a whole service on market validation because we found there
are a lot of would-be entrepreneurs as well as existing business owners who
are concerned with how to determine if their idea is viable. They're also
frustrated with how expensive it can be. One client was told "Write us a check
for $400,000 and we'll see how far we can get" without any consideration for
whether the idea has merit! We help them determine that for a fraction of the
cost, including building the prototype for them.

So, don't give up! Just because you're not getting any responses doesn't
necessarily mean your idea is bad. You probably just haven't been asking the
right people.

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vpEfljFL
I read an interesting book about how to approach customers and friends about
your startup. The main thing is: don't ask biased questions and don't ask
_directly_ about your idea.

Instead of asking "do you like the idea", "will you buy my product" ask about
"do you have such problem", "which tool do you use NOW to solve this issue",
"have you looked for some paid solution" and so on.

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anthony_franco
I reached out to my friends to email-intro me to anyone who might be
interested in my product. That mutual connection made it so that people were
way more willing to jump on a call to discuss the problem space.

I made sure to be respectful and mindful of their time on each interview call.
At the end of the call I asked them to refer me to anyone else that might be
interested too. That way, the number of potential interviewees kept growing.

Eventually we did enough phone interviews to be confident to proceed with the
development.

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jppope
So you're skipping a few steps but I think you have a good chance of avoiding
wantrepreneur land... your post is a good start.

TLDR; Custom > Service > Customized Product > product

Longer version with steps:

1) find a problem

2) find someone that needs that problem solved, solve it for them

3) find someone else that has a similar problem, use some of the stuff from
problem solve #1 to make this build faster, but build new stuff that the
person from problem #1 might want to buy

4) Sell person #1 the stuff from build #2

5) now you have some things that you can try to sell to other people, it will
probably require some customization, but you'll start to get the core of your
future product in each build

6) after few more customers you basically have your product, you just need to
polish it and then take everything you've learned to find more people that
resemble the people you just sold to to go find more people.

7) you no longer need any advice from anyone, you are busy selling your
product

~~~
d--b
Oh wow, i had never read anything like this advice. Did you apply this
yourself?

If the problem I found requires a fair amount of time to solve for person 1,
do you have any advice to avoid making something that only caters to that
person and that’s not extensible to person #2?

~~~
jppope
I've worked for myself a couple of times, where I get to various degrees
through the process... I've typically found a sweet spot with doing custom
work that has proprietary code that I can apply towards new clients... the
work tends to be more interesting for me.

It might also be worth mentioning that product ownership isn't intrinsically
better than providing a service if you have your business model honed really
well. We tend to promote that bigger is always better and that scale is the
only way to make money... neither are inherently true.

... but the above comment I was putting forward is based on the team from
Basecamp and my business mentors.

Regarding your question: The process takes balance and focus. Arguably, a
harder part is customer selection to find the right client to help you with
both your short term and long term goals.

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Edmar
1) Regarding the bias on friends feedback I highly recommend you the book "The
Mom Test". It's a great read on user interviews for product validation.

2) Have you tried cold emailing people? It tends to work better than linkedin
in my experience. Look for people who blogged or tweeted about topics related
to your product. Not everybody will respond but people that the time to share
what they know have a tendency to help other people.

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segmondy
Unless it's super exciting most folks won't sign up. Go for interview. Reach
out to people but ask to talk to them to understand their problem. If your
product solves their problem, then offer it. If it doesn't, you can bend it to
solve their problem and then get them to try it. Best of luck. BTW, you should
checkout YC's startupschool

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DoreenMichele
If your project is your last submission
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20576135](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20576135),
[https://landing.leap.la](https://landing.leap.la)), you should read the rules
for Show HN and submit it as a Show HN. That has much better odds of getting
you some kind of useful feedback.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/show](https://news.ycombinator.com/show)

~~~
d--b
Yes, this is why I didn't post as Show HN. Show HN requires you to actually
build the stuff first...

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rajacombinator
It sounds like you followed good steps, but actually de-validated your
product. Back to the drawing board ...

