

Zero-Dollar Validation: How to Vet Startup Ideas For Free - mayava
http://foundersblock.com/featured/zero-dollar-validation-how-to-vet-startup-ideas-for-free/

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DirtyAndy
Whilst this article is about more than just pitching everyone, that is the
first thing that hits you, and personally I disagree with that as an approach.
If you are at college coming up with the idea of Facebook then maybe it works,
but in general the results you will get are too biased (sometimes in both
directions).

People that care about you (parents etc) are likely to like your idea no
matter what, friends probably fall into this too. When someone says "that
sounds like an OK idea" most people hear "that is the best idea ever". At the
other end of the scale some people just don't listen and are negative, they
cannot immediately see how it will work and dismiss it as a bad idea. And with
regards to things like Mechanical Turk, if your product is really targetting
people who are willing to answer questions for a few cents then great, but in
general I can't imagine it is that useful.

Pitching and validating ideas against people in your real target market is a
good start, but even then there is a massive difference between saying they'll
pay for something and actually paying for it. If you pitch someone an idea and
it results in useful questions and a level of excitment then that is a better
indicator, if someone says that sounds great and then starts talking about
something completely offtopic then I would say that means they don't really
believe it.

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mayava
Pitching is not the be-all-end-all, and you'll certainly get to a point where
it stops being so useful for you (i.e. if you've already determined the
reasons why certain people aren't interested in your product, no need to pitch
them). We're not advocating pitching for the sake of pitching, we're
advocating being methodical about and maximizing your learning from your
pitches.

For example, biases will definitely crop up when you pitch people. They will
also crop up when you go to try to acquire customers or deal with users, so
it's good practice to field them early on. Going outside your normal circles
will expose you to people who aren't your friends just trying to be nice or
"experts" who think they know it all and that your product sucks, so that you
can 1) sharpen your own communication skills (you'd be surprised how many
startups suck at describing what they do), and 2) refine your understanding of
customer concerns.

Also, pitching is just the beginning of validating your idea. For example, if
you get people who sound excited and say they'll pay for your product, and
then they don't, there can be a number of causes: 1) Maybe they were just
being nice, 2) Maybe your product doesn't meet their expectations, 3) Maybe
they changed their minds, etc. If you don't pitch these people, you don't have
the opportunity to develop the customer insights you can get once they take a
harder look at your product.

In the event that someone listens to your pitch and is totally disinterested,
this can be valuable too. It may be that the person you thought was a
potential customer actually isn't - I'd dig deeper to find out why. Maybe you
just need to explain it a different way, or catch them at a better time.

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mayank
Does anyone else feel a little uneasy about the "Twidium" tool mentioned in
the article? They find auto-following bot accounts and follow them to boost
your follower count. Sounds like typical dirty SEO that doesn't really create
any value [1]. Wouldn't it be better to genuinely add some value with your
product (and thus your Twitter feed)?

[1] <http://www.twidiumapp.com/accounts_list.htm>

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mayava
Twidium is a bit of a skeevy looking tool, I must admit. So far, we've only
used it to follow people who have specifically put certain keywords in their
tweets or bios, and it has worked well in helping us finding highly engaged
consumers. Have you tried using it?

~~~
mayank
I haven't had cause to, but I would be afraid that if Twitter implements some
sort of PageRank-style spam detection, my account would be sucked into the
great cleanup if I'm following a lot of bots.

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mayava
The "Follow All" bot strategy seems to be an optional package you can buy. We
didn't even know about it until your comment, so it seems to be that you'd be
fine as long as you don't opt in to that particular strategy.

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wmboy
I definitely agree with pitching to everyone. Start by pitching your idea to
your (hopefully for this purpose) non-technical wife/gf/partner and changing
your pitch (and perhaps your idea) until he/she understands it straight away.

Never thought of the Mechanical Turk idea before... sounds like it's worth a
try.

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DerekH
I've never looked into Mechanical Turk either. Sounds like something that
could be helpful.

I wonder what a good budget would be for using it successfully.

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dstorrs
I've done this. I set up a survey on SurveyMonkey and then created a series of
tasks on MT to send people to it.

I paid about USD$0.05 per survey and spent something like $30 or $40 (I don't
recall exactly). I got thousands of people taking the survey, they were from
all over the world, all different demographics, and the information was solid
-- i.e., people didn't just type "jfalksdfjkjhgkj" to try to steal the money.

One thing to be aware of: since this will be an international audience, their
English reading skills will be at various levels. Make sure your directions /
questions are _very_ clear and simple.

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mayava
I highly recommend that for your first set of questions you either use filter
surveys (ask for age, location, gender, etc) to target people who are in your
target user demographic, or have test questions to make sure they really
understood your pitch (ex: Summarize this product in 30 words or less).

In my studies, I limited the respondents to the US, because I was getting too
much noise from international workers. I also gave them the option of leaving
more detailed feedback. Most of them did, to my surprise.

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wmboy
What did you find was the best way to get quality traffic to the survey page?

