
Is organic growth a good way to validate an idea? - maurocasas
I&#x27;ve been working on Actuame.com for the last 4 months, and without any kind of promotion, and just by sending out.. 25 e-mails tops I have recieved a really good feedback and as of right now, there&#x27;s 1011 users registered.<p>My question is, is this good enough to use as an idea validation reference? If not, what would be a good alternative.<p>I&#x27;m still learning a lot about startups<p>Thanks a lot!
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josho
Think about it from a different perspective. You are validating your business,
not idea. What leap of faith assumptions have you made that you need to
validate to determine if you have a viable business?

For most startups these days, and what I can tell from yours, the hardest part
is customer acquisition. So, validate things around acquiring customers. E.g.
how much does it cost to acquire a single customer, can you demonstrate that
you can repeat that process (even at the small scale).

It's hard to summarize these points in a couple paragraphs, I'd suggest
reading Eric Ries, and Steve Blank to get an understanding of the principles.

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maurocasas
As the business model I'm aiming to hasn't been completely revealed just yet,
I'm focusing on user adquisition right now, people who will actually apply to
job openings.

I'll check out those authors, thanks for your comment!

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davismwfl
First, it depends on what you are going for, do you want to raise money? That
is a different gauge then if you are just trying to make sure you are heading
the right direction.

Do you have paying customers and are they engaged using your system? From my
brief look at the site it looks like the services are free.

Generally getting some traction even with free customers is a good sign, but
getting people to fork over money is what separates many hobbies from
businesses. Although there are other revenue models, but either way, getting
someone to pay you (e.g. revenue) is a better sign then just signups.

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maurocasas
First of all, thanks for taking the time to check out the site.

Right now, as I said on another comment I'm focusing on adquiring users who
will apply to the job openings.

I want the service to be completely free for those who want to get freelance
gigs, and I'm aiming to provide B2B services to agencies and media producers.

I'm currently planning out the following iteration of the project which will
start displaying some of this "B2B direction" for the product.

Thing is, I'm currently the only person working on this heh It's quite a
challenge though, I love it.

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davismwfl
Totally understand trying to do it all.

You are doing good, and that is a good user base to start with in 4 months.
Expanding the B2B to pay for things while keeping it free for candidates is
probably the right approach. I'd say keep doing what you are doing and try to
get some of the B2B side moving because without that your growth of candidates
will fall and you will start loosing traction. Gotta have the businesses for
the candidates to get exposed to.

No matter what remember that whether you fail or succeed, enjoy yourself and
don't beat yourself up over mistakes they will happen.

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maurocasas
I completely share the idea about reaching businesses early to generate
traction, and I'm currently going that way with the B2B launch.

I'm looking to generate a few contracts before launching and run closed tests
with these people in order to polish the product before making a public
release of it.

I genuinely appreciate your comments, thanks!

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andersthue
Doing a startup wether a bootstrapped or vc funded is one long series of
validation excersises mixed with the eventual app crashes and data loss that
spice up your life.

Getting any users validates that they find it interesting enough to sign up,
then you must validate more by looking at their interactions, if they are
using the app you have done one more validation.

My recommendation is that you get one or more mentors who have done one or
more startup and also get into a mastermind group, check out
[https://mastermindjam.com](https://mastermindjam.com) for help on that.

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maurocasas
Since I launched the first iteration user growth has been stable, and I've
seen people actually using the site.

I also think it's cool to know at least 20ish people (I know of personally)
have found jobs through Actuame!

