In this episode: three ways to validate your product idea. After spending 24 hours in the mini-van with 4 kids, Justin is back from the Easter long-weekend and ready to update us on his progress on this week's project: "Marketing for Developers."
How do you know what people want?
After spending 24 hours in the mini-van with 4 kids, Justin is back from the Easter long-weekend and ready to update us on his progress on this week's project: "Marketing for Developers."
You'd think that I would learn my lesson: in order to do these week-long sprints, plus record and edit this podcast, plus do my day job, I really can't have anything else on my plate. But, like an idiot, I scheduled this Season of the podcast while I was going to be away in Alberta on a 4 day road-trip.
Not sure if I'm going to make the Thursday deadline, but I'm still hoping to make a serious dent in writing this book: Marketing for Developers.
This is the approach that Rob Walling used when he validated his idea for Drip:
I emailed 17 SaaS owners that I know, and I said "I'm thinking about building this product: would you use this? Would you pay me for this?" And out of those 17, I got 11 people who said yes.
People giving you their email address is one proxy for gauging interest. This is what Nathan Barry did with his first book:
There's intention there. When you say "Sign-up to hear more about this book." The assumption there is that you're signing up because you want to buy it.
A third way to validate your idea comes from Brennan Dunn. He thinks that doing a live webinar is a great first step. It's way easier to do a webinar (and see if anyone's interested) than write a book, or create software.
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