Wearing your customer hat to validate an idea...

Two days ago I posted My 8 yeses to get an idea off the ground.... And since I made that chart for myself I had to put it down to the test.

I was working on a Shopify app last week. I jumped ahead of myself and started building the MVP. But then decided to take a step back, create the 8 Yeses chart and go back to the 1st step: Go find potential customers.

Before I go ahead and tell you how I tried to validate the idea I have to tell you what the idea!

• Idea: a Shopify app that offers subscription support service to fix store theme issues/bugs and customization
• Why: I built a Shopify store last year and as a software engineer I wanted to tweak it like I do with anything else and I assumed any store owner wanna do the same.
• Hypothesis: store owners, especially the newbies, want to make changes to their store and customize it but there is no dedicated service to do that. And their only option is to go hire a Shopify dev on Fiverr or Upwork, which code cost $$$ if you wanna do it regularly unless you wanna invest the time to learn basic coding skills.
• Validation: I went and created my first MVP Experiment Canvas as you can see here:
  

As you can see in the canvas to validate the idea I had to run an experiment of building a landing page, share it and see how many signups I get. But wait a second, I don't wanna build anything before I make sure people have that problem that I assumed they have. To do that I had to wear the magic hat, the customer hat! Get dressed like a customer and go sneaking around the web and see what I can find.

I joined couple Facebook groups for Shopify newbies (my profile was saying I'm a software engineer, so I had to hide that), posted on couple of them. Went to reddit, did the same. and again on Shopify community form. and here's a sample of what I posted. Please forgive my lill lies over there. sorry not sorry:

Now what answers did I get to those questions? 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩
yup, red flags all over the place. Most of the assumptions I made were wrong.

First,70%+ of the issues that a new store owners face are theme related, thats good news. The bad news are that most of the new store owners don't go around and play with their theme, this is not why they are on Shopify, they want to SELL.
And what themes most of them use anyway? Shopify free themes ofc which Shopify gives 100% support for free. And for those with custom themes will go to the original developer for support.

If you check my MVP canvas under risk assumption you will see: "The riskiest assumption is that each store owner needs such service at least 4-5 times a month" which now I can confidently say is totally invalid assumption.

So here is my take out:
The bad: the idea is dead before I even started
The good: the idea is dead before I even started, and I didn't waste days working on a landing page, or worse, weeks building a tool nobody needs.

The mistake I've been repeating for the last 3-4 years is jumping ahead and skipping the idea validation. If I did these little tricks with every idea I had it would have saved me weeks of coding things that never saw the light.

So if you are reading this and you are already working on something without a concrete evidence that there are people out there who want your product. STOP everything and go create your MVP canvas and ask yourself, how can I validate my idea without spending any $ or building anything. I know sometimes its really hard to work with these 2 constraints but give it a try you may be surprised.

Note to self: you are good at building things, now go out there an master the idea validation process before you start building again.

you can follow my journey on twitter https://twitter.com/jamalx31