How to validate your startup idea before creating the product?
3 ways to validate your idea. List of top US VCs & investors. DoorDash's first landing page. A tool which can tell you the traffic of any website.
Hey! 👋
This is Dovydas from Exponential Founder. Twice a month, I share resources & information for aspiring founders, entrepreneurs and startup enthusiasts.
Thanks for the messages after the first article! Your support means a lot to me. 🙌
I got some questions about idea validation, whether it’s worth working on it further, etc.
So in today’s post, you’ll find:
How to validate your business idea.
HenryFlow CEO Kamil shares his founders’ journey and tips for others.
A tool which can tell you the traffic of any website.
List of the best startup accelerators in Europe.
And much more! 😎
“Today is your opportunity to build the tomorrow you want.”
– Ken Poirot
Validating your startup idea before creating the product
A few weeks ago, I shared how to get the startup idea. So, when you have it, the second step is to do the research and validate it.
Before investing time and resources into building a product, it is crucial to validate your startup idea to ensure that it has a market and potential for success.
I do not believe that there is a perfect way to validate. The answer here is “depends”. It depends on your product or service, your target audience, etc. But you should know what kind of strategies and tactics others are using.
Steps that you can steal to validate your idea:
Market Research
The first step in validating your startup idea is to conduct market research. Study your target audience and the market to determine if there is a demand for your product or service. This research can provide valuable insights into your target audience's needs and pain points and help you refine your product or service.
Where: use the Internet and tools such as AnswerThePublic, Reddit (or other discussion platforms), Google Trends, and social media channels.
Goal: to research the competitors, see if other people also have this problem, what kind of audience they are, and what solutions there are in the market right now.
📍 Remember: Competition is a good sign. That means the problem exists, and people use current solutions. So think about how you can make it 10x better.
However, if there is no competition at all, it could be a red flag that no one needs this solution.
Don’t forget LinkedIn. You can always leverage your audience, ask them in polls, ask them to comment on what they think under your posts or DM them. Therefore, building your personal brand from an early stage is super important.
🖇 Linkedist team have made a free eBook – Copywriting for LinkedIn. You can learn how to create content which builds a personal brand.
Talk with your Target Audience
Need the fastest way to learn what your users want? Go out of the building and talk to them.
This is one of the most effective ways to validate. By talking directly to potential customers, you can gain valuable insights into their needs, interests, and pain points and determine if there is a market for your product or service.
📍 A great example is Bolt Founder Markus Villing. In the beginning, he went to the streets and talked to every driver. He did the interviews this way.
To get started with user interviews, here's what you need to do:
Prepare a list of questions.
Your questions should be based on the hypotheses you have made about your product or service. The answers to these questions should help you validate or dismiss your ideas.
Schedule meetings with prospects.
There are several ways to do this, including reaching out to them on social media, attending events where your target audience gathers or using specialized tools such as Respondent.io to recruit interviewees.
Conduct the interviews and analyze your findings.
Ask the questions you have prepared, write down the answers of your interviewees, try to spot some repetitiveness in the answers, and understand the needs and what kind of solutions they are using.
📍 Tip: Do not say anything about your idea. Firstly, ask the questions. Otherwise, they will be biased. You can tell it at the end of the interview, or in a perfect world, not telling anything is even better as you do not have any product yet. Just ask if you can contact the person when you have created your MVP (minimum viable product).
📗 Book recommendation: a must to read for any entrepreneur is a book called “The Mom Test” by Rob Fitzpatrick. The author shares how to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea.
Create a Landing Page
Building a landing page has several benefits when it comes to validating your startup idea.
It allows you to test your messaging and see how well it resonates with your target audience. This can help you refine your pitch and make necessary adjustments to your product or service.
A landing page can also help you measure interest in your product or service. By collecting email addresses from interested individuals, you can track the number of visitors and gauge the level of excitement for your product or service.
👇 Example: DoorDash
The founder of DoorDash said that he spent just an evening building a simple landing page. At that time, it was called Palo Alto Delivery.
They didn't spend anything on marketing or sales. So didn’t expect a lot, but just wanted to try and know if someone would call.
The next day they got a phone call and the first delivery.
This is what their landing page looked like. 👇
After the first call, they got more calls the next day, and word of mouth started rolling.
🖇 You can listen to the story of DoorDash HERE.
Probably you are thinking, but hey, Dovydas it’s 2023, how do you get organic traffic?
That’s true. It’s hard. But you can always email your potential audience, find relevant Slack channels, Reddit subreddits, forums, social media and other ways how to get traffic without buying ads. Share about your product everywhere you can.
📍 Just do things that don’t scale. You will learn a lot.
There are many other strategies for validating the idea, but those are my main idea validation steps. Try yourself, test it out, and find a few that work best for your idea.
If you know any other great startup idea testing process, hit “reply” and tell me!
👇
Founder story – Kamil Makowski
HenryFlow – AI-powered workflow automation and integration platform that allows businesses to connect all of their online systems in one place to automate and streamline repetitive and complex workflows.
I asked Kamil a few questions:
How did you come up with the idea for HenryFlow?
My last company was an IT consulting company, and we had a lot of projects regarding API integrations and automation. For some time, we used integration platforms like Zapier, make.com etc., but kept running into limitations that stopped us from delivering the solutions our clients were expecting. Therefore, we decided to build our own platform that would break down all the limitations, make it even more user-friendly, and way more flexible than anything that was available. In the beginning, it was only an internal product used by our consulting clients, but as the platform grew, we saw the potential it had and decided to take it to market as a stand-alone product called HenryFlow.
What was your process for validating the idea?
We used the product internally for about a year while trying and failing with a bunch of ideas and different implementations of the solution. Our consulting clients were bringing the problems and pain points in real-time, and we put a lot of effort into building the product and features directly based on customer requests. For that first year, HenryFlow was only a side project, and only once we had validated that the product was way better at solving the problems our clients had compared to other solutions and sold the first subscriptions, we decided to do a pivot and go all out with HenryFlow. In the next steps, before we even had anything to show (HF was only some code on a server at this point), we talked to as many potential customers from our target groups as possible, trying to understand and validate their pains and challenges. Based on this feedback, we developed a prototype of the interface. It was super ugly and didn’t actually work, but we showed it to the same potential customers and yet again gathered a lot of good feedback. This process continues to run in a loop today.
Where would you start if you needed to create a startup from zero?
It’s all about the problem! Every successful startup is successful because it solves an important problem for a larger number of people. Therefore, understanding the problem is the absolutely most important thing for a new founder/startup. And the only way to understand the problem is to talk to the people who experience the problem every day. Start by reaching out to anybody who you believe can give you valuable insights into the problem, talk to them, and stay open-minded without biasing yourself in any direction. Define the problem and all its details well based on the knowledge you gather. Only then start working on the solution.
Any other tips that you could recommend for aspiring founders?
Educate yourself! The key characteristic of great founders is their ability to learn extremely fast. They need to learn about their problem, their customers, their employees, the market trends, the technology, and everything in between. But most importantly, they have learned HOW to learn. Being a founder is one of the hardest things you will ever do, so make sure you take responsibility for learning how to be a great founder by constantly educating yourself and growing as a person and as a leader. There are so many great books and resources out there, and it’s your responsibility to take advantage of it.
📍 You can connect with Kamil on LinkedIn.
Tool – Similarweb
Do you want to know how your competitor is doing with their website?
What traffic do they get?
🙌 Similarweb can help you to get this information for free.
And that’s a wrap about today’s topic, “How to validate your startup idea before creating the product?.” Below you’ll see some other opportunities, resources, and startup news that could be interesting for you.
Opportunities
👌🏻 Imaguru is launching an accelerator for startups which starts on February 20th. Going to happen in Vilnius, Warsaw, and online.
✊ First Pick applications to accelerator & pre-accelerator are open now! The deadline for applications into the pre-accelerator program is March 13th, and the accelerator program is February 20th.
🎟 Startup Fair releases the dates! The event will happen on September 7th.
Interesting resources
🤯 Canva story. How they got rejected more than 100 times by Silicon Valley VCs.
🎤 Y Combinator demo day pitch videos. Learning how to pitch? Check videos of startups that are worth more than $35 billion right now.
🔥 Need a list of top USA VCs and Angel Investors? Here you go.
🫡 European Startup Accelerators 2023. What programs to consider?
🤠 Justin shares his top fuck-ups while building a startup.
News
⛔️ Solar-powered car company Lightyear goes bankrupt.
🇱🇹 Top 50 Lithuanian startups to watch.
🇫🇮 Top 10 Finish startups to keep an eye on.
💰 Private Equity & Venture Capital in Practice course for free in Vilnius! It starts on March 7th.