

Ask HN: Validate my idea - vsakos

The idea is: Digital guestbook<p>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&#x27;s touchscreen. Another alternative is that you can find the place on your smartphone browsing the nearly places based on your gps location.<p>And no, it&#x27;s not like Yelp because it aggregates places, mine will give you a private page with the reviews from your visitors.<p>So, what do you say?
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vitovito
Hi! Designer and researcher, here. When Steve Blank/Eric Ries say you should
"validate" your idea, this is not what they mean. This is not validating an
idea. This is having a solution and looking for a problem.

To 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!

~~~
ASquare
+1 to this response. I'll just add specific questions to ask when you're
interviewing specific people about their problems that you believe you will
solve. Note that this is not about your solution at all at this point - its
about learning whether there is a problem even worth solving.

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.

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petersouth
fast food restaurants like chick fil a and checkers do this. I fill out a
lengthly survey on the receipt and get a free sandwich. I don't see many sit-
down restaurants doing this and it is surprising. I think you have something.
What I don't like is the signature thing. Don't recommend adding/implementing
that.

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lun4r
What's the benefit for the restaurant owners and their customers? What would
you say is your riskiest assumption? Which would be harder: getting restaurant
owners to invite their customers to leave a message, or getting their
customers to post a message? Think of a small-scale experiment how you could
test your assumptions.

~~~
vsakos
It's smartphone era, you like it or not. And it's more paper saver.

~~~
johnwhitech
Yet it is still more cumbersome and less fun than to grab a pen on an open
book at the entrance of the restaurant, and scribble something. As a customer,
normally I would not take the time to scan a QR code and post something
online. An visible open book might convince me.

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ganessh
If I am the owner of a restaurant, I will go to the Yelp page and see the
customer reviews. What advantage are you going to offer, so I should subscribe
to you?

