Idea validation: How to find users to talk to

One thing every marketing gurus, successful startup founders and incubators will insist again and again is to validate your idea as early as possible. And the best way to validate your idea is to talk to your potential users (preferably not your friends and family).

Sometimes this is easy because the problem that you are trying to solve is around you and you just get out, stop a few strangers, introduce yourself, tell them what you are trying to do and start a conversation.

Sometimes it is not so easy. Finding the right people is difficult because identifying them and isolating them from a crowd is a challenge.

If you don’t know what to build to sell, you should start selling to learn what to build.

The steps are simple:

• Have a clear definition of who your potential users are
• Assume that your product is already done.
• Create the sales page of your product. Nothing too fancy, just a single page website that talks about the features and benefits to the users along with a few use case scenarios.
• If your final product will have paid slots only, then put that dollar figure in this sales page also. This will also validate the price that you have in mind.
• Collect the details of the users who sign up and on the next page, say that the product is still under development and you will inform them as soon as the product is ready.
• If possible set up A/B testing. Google’s Optimize is a free service for A/B or Multi-Variate testing
• Start selling your product. Spend some money on Ads, Spread in your social network, cold-email potential users and influencers and so on
• Do not waste your time in SEO etc because SEO takes time to show results (it can take 3 to 6 months or more depending on the keywords you are targeting).
• That is it.

If you did everything as mentioned above… one of the following things will happen

1. There will be no sign ups
   All your marketing and promotion efforts would result is zero signups. It means either your solution is bad, or your sales message is bad. Try to figure that out, fix it and try again. If it does not improve in the next iteration, then kill this idea and start working on another idea.
2. There will be a few users
   Out of a few thousand who visit your site, you will have a handful of users who will signup.
   This is a good starting point. It means that you are onto something and now you need to start talking to these users and figure out what problem they want to get solved and how.
3. You will have a lot of users
   If you are lucky and smart and if you did everything right, you will have a big number of users who signup.
   It will be so big that you will have absolutely no doubt about your product idea.
   If this happens, you should stop doing whatever you are doing and spend all your time and money to bring this product to market.

There you go… now you have a bunch of potential users whom you can contact and follow up and perform surveys and so on. These are highly qualified leads who have exactly the problem that you are trying to solve and who like your solution.

Note of warning: There will always be some users who sign up because they want to solve their problem right now. These users will get angry when they realize that you are just selling a dream right now. So keep that in mind when you are working on your sales page.

If you liked it, you might also like my article on “Step by step guide to validate product ideas within 72 hours using free tools” and also “10 things I wish I knew before I launched my last product”.

I am learning to market my product “Online Marketing Wizard”. I believe that the best way to learn something is to share my knowledge with others. Do follow me as I share whatever I learn through these short and simple articles.

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