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Ask HN: How do you validate demand for your side-project?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you validate demand for your side-project?

#61

Post by codingdave »

soared wrote: post #28
Winterflow3r wrote: post #22

Some things I've found helpful (I run a niche search engine and curation platform): 1) Find niche subreddits where people that are your target audience hang out, observe communities, help people out, participate in the discussion, if someone has a problem that your product can solve, then help them out in the comments and see what their feedback is 2) Learn a bit of SEO - you don't need to be an expert to fix some lo…

Agreed on #1. Once youre a legitimate member of a subreddit, post a beta version of your site. If it actually provides value and is useful (and you are not shilling), people should love it. Here is an example: https://old.reddit.com/r/Denver/comments/qshpov/i_started_ma... 522 votes and 51 comments on a relatively small subreddit put it in near the top for a day or two. Idea validated.

Did any of that traffic become a paying customer?

My experience has been that reddit is great for validation. Traffic and kudos. Compliments and constructive critique. But almost no traffic from reddit resulted in people willing to sign up and pay money.

Now, admittedly, I sold my profitable side project a couple years back. Maybe the trends have changed - so I'm curious whether reddit users are now actually potential customers, or is it still just good for traffic?

Re: Ask HN: How do you validate demand for your side-project?

#62

Post by gumby »

DarylZero wrote: post #58
gumby wrote: post #40

Set yourself a discriminating target. A friend’s kid asked me for some advice about his startup. It is a SAAS in the elder care space; he’d developed it for his grandmother and had a few friends using it as well. He asked this same question (except it wasn’t a side project). I suggested, “If you can get 50 people whom you don’t already know to use this product for more than a month then you might have a winner.” The…

If you have to completely build the product before you validate that there is demand for it, what is the point of validating the demand

Note I mentioned that he had a fire friends of his using it. This was for the MVP of his free offering.

Re: Ask HN: How do you validate demand for your side-project?

#63

Post by dwild »

DarylZero wrote: post #58
gumby wrote: post #40

Set yourself a discriminating target. A friend’s kid asked me for some advice about his startup. It is a SAAS in the elder care space; he’d developed it for his grandmother and had a few friends using it as well. He asked this same question (except it wasn’t a side project). I suggested, “If you can get 50 people whom you don’t already know to use this product for more than a month then you might have a winner.” The…

If you have to completely build the product before you validate that there is demand for it, what is the point of validating the demand

Maybe to justify or not investing in advertisements for it.

Re: Ask HN: How do you validate demand for your side-project?

#64

Post by dwild »

baxtr wrote: post #33
goatherders wrote: post #14

Sell one unit to someone. In fact, do it before you start coding. Coworkers, business contacts. "If I built X would you pay for it? Yes? Cool, what's a fair price?" Get one of those first, then open your terminal. Aside from showing there is a non-zero market for your wares, it also proves that you are willing to do the hard part which is the selling, not the building. If you won't do the hard part then you are wasti…

According to "The Mom Test" that's actually something you should avoid doing. If you ask people they might answer "yes" because - they're being nice to you - they think in that very moment they would but in a real situation they wouldn't In my experience, reducing "value risk", which OPs question is essentially about, has to happened incrementally. So build something small and then try to sell it to someone. Work wit…

> If you ask people they might answer "yes" because > - they're being nice to you > - they think in that very moment they would but in a real situation they wouldn't

You forgot that one: - they would actually buy it

> In my experience, reducing "value risk", which OPs question is essentially about, has to happened incrementally.

That does seems to be the goal of the question... you reduce the risk. You can't be sure it's perfect, like every single step of validation, but you do reduce the risk. That's true because it's still possible they answer "no".

I think it's also extremely important because of the point of OP:

> it also proves that you are willing to do the hard part which is the selling

This is the biggest issue with a big majority of people on Hacker News. We are good a building, not selling. Which is also a big reason why it's pretty useful to find another founder that would fill theses lacks of experiences.

Re: Ask HN: How do you validate demand for your side-project?

#65

Post by ultrasounder »

alin23 wrote: post #57

* Build the minimum needed features to solve the problem for your own use case * Make it open source * Give it away for free It's not the golden rule that will work for everything. But that's what I did with Lunar, my app for controlling monitors ( https://lunar.fyi ) and it helped enormously with adoption and with seeing if a large enough user base could be created. A lot of users offered to donate, others told me t…

Great idea! Will adopt this framework for my side projects

Re: Ask HN: How do you validate demand for your side-project?

#66

Post by sova »

I wrote a handbook a little over a year ago about creating startups [0]. One of the most important points is ensuring that your product addresses a market gap. Demand cannot be created, it can only be awakened. In brief, one must: identify a market gap, contemplate a solution from the user's context and needs, create a prototype that demonstrates the core of the product (Minimum Viable Product), and do sales or pre-sales of that to complete the validation.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Rocketshipping-accelerated-thinking-S...

Re: Ask HN: How do you validate demand for your side-project?

#67

Post by wizardofmysore »

danielvaughn wrote: post #13
wizardofmysore wrote: post #7

Fake door testing. Create a marketing page and see the reaction you get.

I thought about doing that, but it felt like false advertising and I didn't want to (a) piss people off, (b) underwhelm them, or (c) commit to getting the project ready for use by any specific date. Am I overthinking it?

Set an expectation that you plan to launch by some date and collect email id. If they are willing to share their email then that shows they are really interested.

Re: Ask HN: How do you validate demand for your side-project?

#69

Post by ineedasername »

alin23 wrote: post #57

* Build the minimum needed features to solve the problem for your own use case * Make it open source * Give it away for free It's not the golden rule that will work for everything. But that's what I did with Lunar, my app for controlling monitors ( https://lunar.fyi ) and it helped enormously with adoption and with seeing if a large enough user base could be created. A lot of users offered to donate, others told me t…

I guess the 1% maybe weren't around for it have forgotten the shareware distribution method.
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