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- đ§ How to validate your SaaS idea (Building 101 #2)
đ§ How to validate your SaaS idea (Building 101 #2)
Learn when to trash ideas and when to double down! PLUS - a subscriber-only guide on landing pages.
Hey all,
Welcome to #2 of the (almostâŚ) new âBuilding 101â series đ running over the next 6 - 8 weeks with a full rundown of the practical steps involved in building and growing your own tech products.
If you didnât get a chance to read part 1 all about how to generate your own ideas, then make sure you catch up! And you can refer back to any part of the series, at any time here.
This week, weâre looking at how to start validating product ideas.
Letâs jump in⌠âŹď¸
đ§ How to validate your product ideas
Everyone talks about validation as the most important step in building (or not buildingâŚ) any product. This is much to the dismay of anyone with some programming skills - we just want to get stuck in and solve the problem!
The reality is, spending weeks building an awesome product to solve a problem no one has isnât a very good way to go about starting a business.
Before we get hands-on keyboards (and donât worry, we willâŚ) we need to know if our time investment is going to pay us back dividends in the future.
There are 3 things you have to understand before you can decide whether to take an idea forward or trash it altogether:
Your problem
Your market
Your competition
Write these down, and tick them off as you go through. First, start with understanding the problem you're trying to solve.
Know your problem intimately
Could you explain the problem clearly to a 10-year-old child? If not, then you donât know your problem well enough. This sort of raw understanding rarely comes from just having the problem yourself.
Donât get me wrong - having the problem yourself gives you a massive upper hand but in order to truly validate it as a business - you have to talk to users.
The classic example is The Mom Test. You should never ask your family if something is a good idea - their response will always be âItâs amazing⌠because you're amazing!â.
In reality, this is true of anyone we ask. Weâre all so scared of upsetting people that we often hide our true thoughts and feelings. So how can we judge if our ideas are worth pursuing?
Instead, explain the concept to your customers and ask leading questions like âHow do you solve this problem currently?â and âHow often do you have this problem?â. This instantly relaxes people as weâre all more confident talking about something we understand and will likely raise follow-up questions.
It also gives you a feel for where your problem sits in this plot:
High pain problems that occur often are likely to gain traction
The golden zone is where all the âbestâ problems are - high pain and customers encounter them very often (hopefully dailyâŚ). Almost all major technological advancements going right back to the wheel sit in this zone - itâs still true now and always will be.
If your idea is solving a problem in the golden zone - stick a tick in your first box!
Know your market
Whatâs also true of these problems is that youâll never be the first to address them - thereâs likely some competition. As part of validating your idea, you have to understand the forces at play in your chosen market.
This starts at the industry level, and to begin with, itâs useful to think of industries involved in technological development as falling somewhere on this plot:
You can debate where exactly these points should sit but the general trend is that the more complex a problem, the less competitive the solution marketplace will be. And over time as technology becomes more sophisticated the dots tend to shift right and downward creating more opportunities for solo builders.
As weâre looking to build products of our own, we have to be realistic about what we can achieve. If you want to create a new social network or revolutionise the insurance industry, then thatâs great - but you're going to need a lot of help!
Therefore great validation is to plot your own product onto the chart above. If you're less competitive than âe-commerceâ and less complex than âwork managementâ then stick a tick in your next box!
Although this is a general trend there are plenty of great problems lurking in other areas of the chart. The bottom left quadrant for example contains many relatively untapped niches that may have yet to fully undergo a digital transformation and therefore have minimal competition.
However, stay away from the top right quadrant - these problems will have you working your butt off in both solution design, and in winning customers.
Know your competition
You should now hopefully have two ticks against some of your ideas. Now for the more labour-intensive part - making a list of competitors.
Here are 3 places to look:
Google (obviously!)
G2 - a review-based platform with thousands of listings
SimilarWeb - analytics platform for competitor analysis
There should be at least 2, but no more than 5 âhigh-qualityâ existing solutions to your problem.
There are likely more than 5 solutions, but we need to know what âhigh-qualityâ looks like so now collect the following information on each:
Year they launched
Price point
If tiered, note down the lowest, highest and average of all plans
Number of customers
This can be difficult to find if itâs not advertised on a website, especially for small businesses - a cold call can work đ.
Average organic Google rank for a specific search term
Try things like âSoftware to manage [X]â. This gives you an idea of how successful their digital strategy is. Check for any paid ads they might be running.
Average organic Google ranking for business/product name
This gives you an idea of general brand recognition. Check the paid ads here too as often other competitors will pay to rank for a competitorâs brand name.
Number of features released in last 3 months
Get a feel for this from blog posts and other social content. And if you canât find anything - thatâs an opportunity for you to differentiate alreadyâŚ
Quality of support
Check what SLAs are claimed and check responsiveness by making use of any free trials and submitting dummy requests. Check reviews to get an idea of general system health.
Then, importantly, check their tech stack. There are numerous ways of doing this but the easiest way is to install Wappalyzer and run this on the platform, making use of any free trials.
This is important as a modern tech stack can dramatically improve the speed of execution.
This can be highly industry-dependent and isnât a hard and fast list, but in most cases, here are things to keep an eye out for:
Modern â React, Vue, Svelte, Next â Node, .NET | Dated â JQuery â PHP, Ruby |
Combine this with a gut feeling for how âdynamicâ the business comes across - the more so, the more likely they run a tight ship from a technological standpoint.
Once you start collating and comparing all this data, it quickly becomes clear what âhigh-qualityâ is for your specific problem.
If youâve successfully compared your competitors and can start to see areas where you might be able to differentiate, then give yourself your last tick!
Congrats! Youâve just validated your first set of ideas. Hopefully, at least one or two look promising and can be taken forward. This is something you should continue to revisit throughout your building journey.
Now onto one of the most well-understood ways of validating a product idea and getting early feedback - landing pages.
Start with a landing page (Subscribers only! đ§ )
Whilst there are tonnes of debates around validating ideas, most agree on one thing: landing pages work.
A landing page is just a one-page website where potential customers can learn about your solution to their problems. There are two main ways this can help you:
Collecting email addresses
Instant analytics
Collecting email addresses
Any email addresses you collect can be converted into beta users further down the road. These emails are super hot, as theyâre real users that have the problem you're trying to solve, and are willing to engage when you donât even have a product yet!
If you really understand your market and have engaged with some customers already, youâd have somewhat of an email list straight away. Try to build this up to at least 30 or so emails from subreddits, Quora and Linkedin. (Hereâs a great tool for finding targeted communities on Reddit).
Draft personal welcome emails to send out to those that sign up. But going back to validation step 1 - make sure to include the following questions:
What happens when [problem X] occurs in your business? (indirect)
How often do you have [problem X]? (direct)
How do you currently work around this? (indirect)
What would you pay for a solution that could take away some of the pain? (direct)
What would an ideal solution look like for you? (indirect)
For those that reply, try to schedule a call with them to discuss their responses. Physically talking to users and building a report is almost guaranteed to get you a signup when you launch.
Analytics
Landing pages are just like any other website so they should be set up to collect everything possible about visitors.
Install Google Analytics and if possible install something like HotJar which lets you directly track how users interact with your page.
Itâs awesome to watch which features users spend the most time scrolling around on and can help you decide what to build first!
Getting started
Focus on speed so use a website builder like Framer (great âtech-inspiredâ look and feel) and start from a template. Make sure your landing page includes the following details:
Clear value proposition statement and call to action (to submit their email)
At least 3 âkey featureâ sections with designs to help your potential customers visualise your solution
If you are comfortable with design concepts then you could try a tool like Figma, otherwise stick to something more simple like MockFlow to create wireframes of your features.
There are heaps of examples to look at here which would be replicable using the above tools.
Round-up
Thatâs it for this week!
There are loads more value to pull out here in terms of validation, but hopefully, this gives you a starting point to know when (and when notâŚ) to take an idea forwards.
In part 3 of Building 101, weâre going to be doing a deep dive into MVPs and why getting it wrong and building too much can cost you months in getting to market.
Start building that landing page! âď¸
P.S. If you want to get more discussions like this in your inbox every week then make sure you sign up for the email newsletter here!
Community products! đĽ
Famewall
This week weâre taking a look at Famewall.io, a platform for collecting and displaying social proof on your website.
Trusted by over 1200 entrepreneurs and creators, the platform allows you to easily manage testimonials from multiple sources like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Reddit and embed them into your website in one platform.
It even integrates with app stores which I think is really neat!
The platform also makes it easy for those who donât yet have testimonials to start automating that process and get off the ground. This is achieved through personalised feedback collection pages and shareable links.
Whatâs also great is that your customers can submit text-based feedback, but also video reviews which are awesome at converting visitors.
All these great features are included in the free plan from day one, which is great for those of us just starting out with our projects and juggling various associated costs.
Congrats to gouthamjay8 on a great product!
P.S. Check out the official IdeaHub Reddit community where you can share ideas with other builders.
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