MVP Step 4: Choose your own adventure
So great news, everyone! I’ve just coded up a fully functional SaaS service — if you’re interested, the email form is below. This article is about why I chose to build instead of sell.
tl;dr — your motivation is not necessarily the same as your mentor’s
This is a follow up to my other article about when to stop validating the idea and start building it. Except this is more like “Do I pre-sell or build?”
In which this really resonated with me:
Trust yourself and you will know when it’s time to stop building and start selling
- TwerkingPoodle
This made me decide to stop trying to pre-sell because I didn’t think it was time to do so. I wanted to just friggin build it and ship it… So thanks, TwerkingPoodle for telling me to trust my instincts!
I know, I know. You might say that you shouldn’t build anything before you get some pre-orders. Well I was stuck at that point — since my target audience are consumers and I have such a small reputation, it will be much much harder for me to get anyone to pre-order compared to people with a huge reputation (which are usually the people I listen to for advice).
After a while, I’ve started realizing that the advice I’m taking (which is constant validation and no building until you get money) addresses those who are doing the startup game for real. But that’s not me, I love to code especially when it helps me solve a real problem.
Money is nice too, but the idea of getting something functional motivated me most.
Take all advice with a grain of salt — figure out who that advice is aimed at before you take it to heart — your situation could be different.
Here’s what helped me, but as I said, your mileage may vary:
- Creating a landing page with a video showcasing the simplest functionality of what you’re going to build.
- Using private channels (private Facebook groups or Slack channels) to get validation and share said landing page.
- Talking to people that I don’t know about my idea (I used Calendly to schedule at most 2 of these idea validation interviews per day)
- Spending X days straight focusing on coding a fully functional prototype. ← People may not agree with this, but that’s because of what I said before, your situation may be different from mine.
My next steps are to make a video showcasing the feature that takes URLs and converts them to a podcast episode on your personal podcast feed. When that’s done, you’ll be able to find it here:
Please ❤ the article if you’ve ever been stuck between pre-selling and building!
