From idea to validation in 24 hours

Hey! That's a fair question. And the answer is: yes, it's harder.

But, there's a few ways you can overcome that flaw:

• go deep into the conversations with prospects so that they trust you

• provide a very significant discount

• come up with some quick UI's using common UI libraries and pretend this is gonna be the final product

• forget actually collecting the payment, just make a button that says "buy now" and measure the CTR (less good, because many people stop their payment while entering their card details, but still a pretty decent indication if you give all the pricing info beforehand)

• add some FOMO like limited seats, soon to expire discounts, etc.

I also really like this blog post by @chddaniel who pre-sold $1k worth of his SaaS before building it (to be fair, he did have a few advantages audience-wise but I'm not saying you should sell for $1k worth to validate demand): https://www.simple.ink/blog/how-to-presell-saas

You're right about this. If you want to increase your chances, it's nice to have a demo or even an MVP. It will definitely help boost the conversion rate.

That being said, if you can't do that:

• I would steer away from those illustrations with weirdly-shaped characters that just about every designer is making now

• I think Lottie Files (the website) has some pretty good animated illustrations you can use

• Whimsical is a great, easy and free product to make a user flow. For some niches who are facing a very painful problem, just seeing this will be enough to convince them to take a chance on you.

• Limit the number of available seats

• Provide a once in a lifetime chance at a huge discount ($10 spent for a product that doesn't exist is probably just as much of a commitment as $500 spent for a product that does exist)

• If you have good charisma on video (unlike me), maybe make something that looks pretty good with a sales pitch!

Thanks Kareem!

It's just my opinion but I don't think you can truly validate without someone actually committing to payment.

So if you're uncomfortable collecting or implying you're going to collect a payment for something that isn't built yet, I would suggest you build an MVP. Will make the process longer, but will fit your preference better.

Hey Ark! Oh don't worry I've gotten that feedback in other comments as well ;)

Happy to answer, and I actually agree with your scepticism.

Just for context: this post originated as a comment I made on a post asking "how to validate demand in 24 hours". I was asked to write a long form version so I did.

I have however applied the general method in the past. And I did it with a very limited audience. I did that with an "NFT marketing course" (didn't make a sale, so never wrote it), and an "online community search engine" (made sales, delivered a MVP, got refund requests, and decided to not pursue because I wanted subscription-based and users wanted one-time payment + technically difficult to make a great product worth being subscribed to).

Did it take exactly 24 hours? For the NFT one yes, for the other one it was more like 48 hours.

I applied the same method with a twist (meaning a quick MVP that added approx. 4-5 days to the mix), and that did lead to Tweet Hunter which is the business I now run with my co-founder.

In any case, this is not a statistically correct sample size for sure.

Now, if the method doesn't lead to a sale (or reach the metric performance you've defined), of course that doesn't mean the idea is stupid and should be thrown away. Personally, I throw it away because I have too many ideas and don't want to take each of them through a long iteration loop until I figure out how to make them work. I prefer to focus on ideas that get that very very early traction, but that's just me.

But it's very likely an idea I throw away because of this method wasn't actually bad at all. I just built it / packaged it / sold it wrong probably.

Longer cycles can definitely be more adapted to:

• some ideas that are more complex, or focused on long sales cycles with enterprise clients / high ticket items
• some founders, who really love their idea and are ready to commit to it for a few months, or don't like putting too much time pressure on something

Also I think one can apply a similar method, but as a way to make iterations instead of "throwing away / pursuing an idea".

So yeah, for sure this method is not foolproof, it's not for everyone, and it's not for every kind of idea. Not following it is probably just as fine as following it. If it fits you, great! If not, that's also great and there are other ways to move forward!

People tend to see those posts as "me telling you what you should do and if you don't do that you're wrong". I don't see it like that, I think it's perfectly fine to follow the advice, adjust it to your situation, or not follow it at all. There's always plenty of advice online, and it's rarely good advice for everyone.

Hey Tzahi, yes! Definitely a good idea to make some demo / mock-ups / little animations. For the timeline, it's definitely one should adjust to his/her own pace, preferences and idea.

As for asking people in a mall a series of questions, unless that's your target audience, I would avoid that. I've done the mistake of trying to validate things (ideas, UIs, etc.) with the wrong audience before, and wow did that hit hard when we released. For example, I was building a kids educational app and wanted to test designs. I went to a train station and asked families that were waiting for their train if their kids could tell me what they thought of the designs.

1. They loved it
2. I built it
3. My users hated it

Why? Not sure, but maybe because they were all just bored and excited to have something distracting to do? Maybe they didn't actually use apps? Or maybe they just wanted to be nice.

So I had to build again and then it worked well for my target audience. But validating the designs was done more professionally, amongst kids who already used apps, with various options to pick from, and in a more appropriate setting (their home, where the app was meant to be used).

I think the landing page is fine. It'd be nice to add some "pretend mock-ups" just for it to feel like there is indeed a product in the works.

Now, I actually have made a kids educational app before. One thing I did very badly was the design because I was targeting kids age 6 to 10. You target even wider, 6 to 12. My advice would be to perhaps consider making that age range much narrower, because I learned the hard way that a 6 y/o may love a design ("so cool") that a 9 y/o will absolutely hate ("it's for babies"). If your app is really meant to be used by kids, watch out for that! Maybe have multiple designs for different age ranges, or just target kids aged 8 to 10.

I would say you probably have identified a problem, but you haven't validated that your solution fixes it and that you have the skills to sell it. So I would still go a step further.

Yes that's one of the takeaways I wanted people to get about this. Over the past 10 years it's become actually easier and easier to build products and solutions. So it made selling them a lot more complicated because of fierce competition.

Great question. Sometimes the pool of clients isn't that big.

I would definitely speak to them again at every iteration, but I would also attempt to find some "fresh new leads" who never heard of you before and see how it goes.

Unfortunately, as often with indie making, the answer is "both" 🤣

Hey Joe!

First, happy to chat about Driftly, send me a DM on Twitter

Second, the more time you have for each and every phase the better, even more so the selling/marketing stage which for most founders should be at least 50% of their time.

But it's also important to set yourself a deadline to get things done. In this case, the original post I wrote a (very short) version of this piece for was about how to do it in 24 hours. So that's what I wrote about. But doing it in 48 hours, 72 hours, or 2 weeks doesn't sound like a bad option to me. 3 months? -> maybe you went too far.

That's my take!

Hey Archie! Agreed, it's been discussed in some other comments. Not validating with this method does NOT mean the idea is bad. You can still iterate if you find things you should improve. I just get a lot of ideas and have a need to through them away quickly, can't afford long iteration loops. But some people may prefer that and it's totally fine.

Indeed: act fast + start small is the big "applies to everything" takeaway here.

For Tweet Hunter we actually built the MVP over the course of a few days. The overall method was very similar, but we indeed had a very light form of the product ready. Not having an MVP (even a very basic one), is a disadvantage. I'm lucky enough to have complementary skills with my co-founder and this allows us to build those fast.

But validating demand without a product ready is possible. Harder, but doable. And I mean if you can sell something that doesn't exist, that shows to how good the idea is.

As for price range, well that's a hard one to answer. Depends on what it is, who you target, if there's competition/alternatives... If you're targeting indie hackers, price should probably be pretty low 😭

I agree with everything, and thanks for saying it.

This is definitely not a method you should apply blindly to everything.

And also, in the end, it doesn't really invalidate the idea itself. It just proves there's something wrong in the equation, and it's likely not the idea itself because, well, there aren't many "bad ideas".

So applying that to iteration is very valid I think.

Hey Rob, happy to see you here!

I agree fully. This process is to validate demand quickly, not have a thriving business in 24 hours.

Next steps include researching the problem in depth, talking with potential customers, exploring feasibility and, well, building ;)

These are all steps that require quite a bit of time for a lot of products. Which is why it's a good idea to have a mini-24h-version to make sure you're not gonna waste weeks.

Thank you Piotr!

Thanks Alex, I hope it'll prove useful to some!

Thank you Nick!

You're welcome!

Hey @avanathan, I actually mainly invalidated ideas with this method.

Some examples of ideas I invalidated:

• NFT marketing course
• Online community search engine

The one idea I really validated, I had to take it a step further and build the MVP with my co-founder and then apply the same methodology (it added approx. 3 days to the process). But that can't always be done.

Obviously having an audience will make it a LOT easier. But there's plenty of successful founders who don't have an audience.

Many people claim you should build an audience before you build a product. I'm not entirely sure that's true, I think product and marketing need to go hand in hand and be done simultaneously. It's not "one after the other, I'm done with product now I'm gonna do marketing".

As for the landing page conversion rate, again it's a very hard question to answer because it depends on your industry. I believe the average for SaaS is 2.5-3%, but depending on various factors (cost, target audience, importance of product, social proof, etc.) this can vary widely. I would say if you can convert 1 person to buy a product that doesn't exist yet, doesn't matter the conversion rate: you're on the right track.

That's definitely what inspired me. And so many great startups were born out of startup weekends, hackathons and game jams.

But it doesn't have to be something you only do once a year with a group of peers. You can actually apply it to yourself when you're starting out.

I replied to a comment by @Colelyman giving some pointers for this (scroll down). But basically: it won't be that weird if you actually take the time to show you've researched them and aren't randomly messaging people with copy/pasting.

Thanks @Demuchi!

Haha yeah, to be honest sometimes I do too. I've stopped in the past year though, and this method or variations of it has worked pretty well for me. I stopped wasting time on ideas that weren't good or for which I wasn't the right founder;

This is a good first step, especially if you're aiming for a marketplace business model.

However, I have no idea what a good conversion rate is for "people signing up to get notified", so I guess it's hard to know what your target should be for that metric. Or maybe you have insight into that kind of conversion rate? My guess is it should be way higher than a typical "payment" conversion rate.

If you never ship, I suggest you refund them. To be fair: don't charge people for a product saying it exists if it doesn't. I think a good way of doing that is offering a significant discount to those people and, obviously, a refund if you don't go through with it.

You could even go on step further and automatically refund everyone. After all, the point was to prove demand!

Thanks for the compliment!

So my actual product actually started off as me and my co-founder trying to scratch our own itch (mine especially, it's Twitter-related and I used to suck at Twitter).

I say do both: scratch your itch and validate

Validate because you want to be sure other people feel the same way you do.

Scratch your itch because this improves your understanding of the problem AND your motivation to keep working on this long term.

If you want to monetize your product, then you still need to validate. Figure out who are your customers and how to reach them, e.g. cold emails, LinkedIn outreach, SEO, etc. Then find a few to validate your product.

It's gonna depend a lot on what you're building and who you're targeting.

But "asking for feedback" seems a bit "light" to me to prove real demand and validate the idea.

If your approach is to ask for feedback, you're gonna get kind people who give you feedback. And that's great! But it's not what you're looking for.

I would be a bit more forward.

If you play the DM card, I would have a 2-step phase somewhat similar to this:

1. "Hey, I saw that you were [insert something specific to that person to prove you researched them]. Do you ever face [insert problem]? I'd love to know more about how you deal with that."

• wait for reply -

2. "OK, well it turns out that's precisely what I'm developing. We're nearing our private beta release, and looking for 5 people who will have access to the product and the founding team, with a huge discount / lifetime deal. Are you at all interested?"

• if yes, send link

If you play the "public post" card, then it's a bit harder. Ideally you may have some sort of MVP. But maybe you can also just make a user flow with Whimsical to show what you're gonna build. Screen record that and share it publicly, say you'll send the link over to whoever is interested in joining the private beta (only X spots available).

Hope that helps!