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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?

#71
post #27

I listed the widget I made on Tindie and then promptly forgot about it for a few months. But when I got some initial purchase orders, I started paying attention again. When I got a repeat order from a customer, it had my complete attention. I called that customer, we talked about exactly what problem it was solving for them, and I learned a lot. However, it still took me another two to three years before I stopped ev…

Inspiring story. What is the barrier of entry for selling gadgets on Tindie? Do you need to get FCC certifications for example?

Pretty easy to create an account and make a new listing. My widgets are used as test equipment. There is a specific FCC certification exemption for testing tools. 47 CFR § 15.103 (c)

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

#73
Marketing/sales has been the easiest part of the work to me, and I'm a "tech guy". You simply tell people about it and they'll throw money at you.

My first business was selling coffee. I put a coffee machine on a metal table, put some pallets around it. Some dude came and asked for an espresso. He said it was too small and tasted nasty. I told him I'd refund that and give him a latte, which was 8 times bigger than an "espresso". He refused and gave me money anyway. He was later a daily customer after the first latte though. More people came and we sold 100 cups on the first day. Did we do marketing? Yes, we told the people staring at us that we'd give them a full refund if they didn't like it. Nobody took the refund.

My first real startup was a recipe app with an ingredients store. People just went to the store and clicked "add to cart". I did not expect them to. We didn't have a dashboard for viewing orders (nor a cart, the purchase button just took their phone number and address). I hacked something that put together a cart on the dashboard, then I'd contact them on WhatsApp and give my bank account details (we didn't have a payment gateway either).

The hard part is often the product. If you have bad lattes, nobody's going to order another. If you don't have recipes for flaxseed flour, not that many people are going to order the flaxseed flour.

I'd say don't listen too hard to entrepreneurship gurus who tell you to "validate before writing a single line of code". Often the code is part of the validation. I tried to run ads for flaxseed flour and nobody bought it. There's a niche for it, and that niche was overadvertised by other sellers. Writing the code exposed us to a marketing flank we never knew existed, and the app was eventually acquired as a diet food marketing channel, because the CAC was lower than Facebook ads.

You can build something of value and give that for free. That's actually a little easier than trying to go the validation route. From there, you can use the feedback to pivot into something of higher value or is more monetizable (e.g. DLCs). Metallica didn't think they'd make money off music, so they started with t-shirts.

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

#74
post #64
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> This is the biggest issue with a big majority of people on Hacker News. We are good a building, not selling.

That’s actually an excellent point. Selling is an underrated form of art and essential for any successful venture.

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

#75
post #74
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> This is the biggest issue with a big majority of people on Hacker News. We are good a building, not selling. That’s actually an excellent point. Selling is an underrated form of art and essential for any successful venture.

My experience as a professional sales consultant for SaaS startups is that it is not the this cohort is "not good" at selling, it's that it has very little idea of what to actually do. Being a bad salesperson is a different ball of yarn to unspool than not being a salesperson at all.

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

#76
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the biggest issue with a big majority of people on Hacker News. We are good a building, not selling. That’s actually an excellent point. Selling is an underrated form of art and essential for any successful venture.

My experience as a professional sales consultant for SaaS startups is that it is not the this cohort is "not good" at selling, it's that it has very little idea of what to actually do. Being a bad salesperson is a different ball of yarn to unspool than not being a salesperson at all.

What's your advice for typical a builder with no sales experience? Any courses or books you can recommend?

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

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet frame.io seems to be doing very well, it is popping up more and more places.

That is a good point, I haven’t been following film industry closely at all for the last 5 years but > Adobe’s $1bn acquisition of Frame.io took many in the industry by surprise [1] I am surprised. Perhaps this is a case of me not talking to enough people, or maybe people really don’t know what they want until you show it to them. [1] https://www.ibc.org/trends/what-frameios-1bn-sale-says-about...

veed.io is also doing well. Check out how they started on IndieHackers [0]. IMO their key insight was to go towards Canva type users: people who aren't professional video editors but those that just need to edit some video, make social media ads, etc. In other words, casual or prosumer users, not professional users.

[0]

https://www.indiehackers.com/product/veed

https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/195-sabba-keynejad

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

#78
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I build something ready to use I'm gonna advertise it anyway just so that I can sleep at night.

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

#79
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…

I'm a big believer that you can make a lot of money starting a business and only ever selling to "friendlies" (your known network) That said, business value goes up exponentially when it earns the First Dollar, a sale to someone with no existing connection to tue company or anyone in it. Very rarely is First Dollar sale so unique or edge-casey that there aren't dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of prospects that ha…

You can get stuck in the early adopter ghetto. Read Crossing the Chasm.

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

#80
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a big believer that you can make a lot of money starting a business and only ever selling to "friendlies" (your known network) That said, business value goes up exponentially when it earns the First Dollar, a sale to someone with no existing connection to tue company or anyone in it. Very rarely is First Dollar sale so unique or edge-casey that there aren't dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of prospects that ha…

You can get stuck in the early adopter ghetto. Read Crossing the Chasm.

Still, that’s better than having no business at all. Crossing the chasm is a good problem to have
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