Instant landing page - Killing a startup idea quickly
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hey! Interesting article! Thanks for sharing
You mentioned that you did "Pain Point Ad testing". I tried googling it to learn more about it but didn't find anything specific about it. I can imagine approximately what it refers to, but could you elaborate on this step/methodology? Thanks in advance
Thanks for reading!
I'll have to check if it goes by other names. In essence, pain point ad testing is using an ad platform to test if people have a pain point. The general process looks like:
from your idea identify 1 or more pain points (i.e. 'takes too long to create a landing page')
turn each pain point into several headlines, I usually end up with 5+ per pain point (i.e. "It takes too long to create a simple landing page", "Optimizing my landing page is a lot of effort", "My team is asking for me to create a lot of landing pages")
turn each into the most basic ad you could possible imagine. Like a 1/2 color background with white text
run each until you hit 500-1000 impressions. really trying to only spend a few dollars here
evaluate each ad and see if passes general benchmarks. It's product and market dependent but we want things like >2% clickthrough rate and as cheap as possible, like $0.20 cpc
if nothing passes you can iterate with different headlines. eventually you run out of ways to word your pain point and can say that 'people who see ads are not compelled by this pain point'
if some stuff has decent metrics, look for patterns in tone and how you worded things and turn those into multiple new ads. repeat until you get sick of it or have amazing numbers. Eventually this just turns into the regular ad running process with nice images etc.
The nice thing about this process is you can run an iteration in under a day.
In the case of the article we got okay numbers across 2 of our pain points and with a few different headings for each. To us, that indicated that people want this solved so it passed our pp ad test. If we went ahead with the project we knew that Ads were a potentially viable approach to start iterating on.
Hey, amazing! Resonated so much, because I was obsessed with almost the same idea - A/I powered landing page builder, that allows to build landing pages without any drag&drop. You can find the landing page, I've built for quick validation: https://chameleonpages.com/
Didn't start developing project, jumped to validation - some ads, some cold outreach, and decided not continue with it, because the reasons you pointed already! :)
That's awesome haha! One more data point on our decision then.
Your landing page is nice and clean btw. I dig it.
Loved the blog and really a great read. We met a lot of people who want to build the whole product before validating the idea.
For this same thing, we are building a no code landing page maker where you can get your great design landing page with content written which you can use to validate the idea.
Loved the article, great insight into the serial entrepreneur mind and the parsing of ideas, something we all do but never articulate
I'm also building in the same space right now. All I could say is it's crowded, so you have to serve a specific niche or offer something unique. I also recommend reading this article with a unique perspective on validation https://world.hey.com/jason/validation-is-a-mirage-273c0969
You did prove nothing. You have no data to confirm your hypothesis. You ran no test. You made your decision early on based on nothing. Then you just shaped and steered your article to reaffirm what you strongly believed from the beginning, which is fine. But having all the points as you did contributes to nothing. In every single one, you try to convince both yourself and us, with no evidence at all. Your analysis is completely useless. Again, this is fine, to have feeling and an oppinion. The only issue is it is just that, your gut feeling. It can hardly be called an "investigation," as you did in the first sentence. Did I expect you've built an MVP or at least conducted some kind of interview with potential customers when I read your title? Yes, and maybe that is why it is so disappointing.
This article is a casual retrospective of the process I went through. So of course it's going to be driving towards a point because that is the point we found. It's not like I started writing the article did investigation and came back... This wasn't published in a scientific journal where I need to be neutral in my theories.
Not sure where you got the impression that we did no testing? I mention it in a few places. I can't fit every piece of information that we went through on this single blog post, it would be 50,000 words long.
The whole point of this validation process is to be pre-mvp. As in, should I pursue building something at all. We did plenty of customer interviews, talked to people in the industry, had ads and landing pages, drove directed traffic, etc. The key being that we did it as quickly as possible. And those stats/interviews said that it wasn't a good fit for us alongside the competitor research we did.
Clearly you and I think about these things differently, good luck with your approaches!