The Art of the Side Hustle and Finding Product Market Fit
6 tips all tied together with one case study to stop your side hustle from failing before you start.
I’m writing this at a time where many of us across the globe are experiencing “lockdowns” or “shelter in place” enforcements. I don’t need to go into the details of COVID-19, but what I will jump into immediately is the massive spike in “Side Hustles” or businesses that are getting started as many professionals find themselves with an abundance of free time suddenly due to working (or studying) remotely.
With most of my audience being Product Managers (or aspiring PMs) and entrepreneurs, I’ve had an influx of questions around finding product-market fit, or in other words: The degree to which a product satisfies strong market demand. To keep it simple for myself, I like to say finding something that people or businesses will pay you money for over and over again. This is HARD! Let’s look at the app space as an example. According to Gartner, less than 0.01 percent of all consumer mobile apps were financially successful throughout 2018. Financial failure leads to product failure. That means 9,999 in 10,000 will be a financial flop. Again, I’m just using consumer mobile apps as an example, but it paints a really good picture of reality. This may be sobering, but you can beat these odds by having a really good strategy for building the RIGHT product (digital or physical).
I as well, have come across some pockets of free time, so I’m doing some writing on the subject that will help. Note: This will all be useful post COVID-19 so if you’re finding this 1–2 years after publishing, then it will still be useful.
Read this post for 6 tips to stop wasting your time and ensure you achieve product-market fit quickly so that you can start making money (and most importantly) start providing value FASTER! Let’s get after it.
Housekeeping item: To make this as easy to follow as possible, I’m going to relate these steps to a product that our team is building (a simple browser extension) as a case study so that you can have tangible examples. Every time I do this, I will label it “case study”. I will share actual screenshots and I also recommend you give it a download so you can actually see what I’m referring to. Don’t worry, it’s free and for a good cause, raising money for your favorite charities just by browsing the web. You can grab that here.
1. While you have all this extra time to yourself, make sure you’re asking yourself the right questions!
I have written about this in past posts, but I think it’s important to mention here as you consider starting your side hustle. Sometimes you’re missing the mark with your product by not asking yourself the right questions to gauge if your product will be successful. Here are the questions I recommend you ask yourself before getting started! Do not get your credit card out for that Shopify subscription until you answer these:
What problem am I really trying to solve? Is this product a must-have? Is this an Advil (in other words is this a pain killer)? Where would a user or client truly find value in this? Once I find that value, what is the absolute minimal product (MVP) that I have to build to gain traction? Is my timing right for this? Am I willing to invest the next 6–12 months of my life into this? Do I have the right skill set and/or team to accomplish this? Do I have the right finances to give this an appropriate chance of succeeding? Am I confident that people will open their wallets for this?
Sometimes, these are the questions you don’t want to ask yourself because you’re excited about your product. Don’t worry, I’ve been there, blinded by my own daydream only to fall on my face when the product reaches the real world. Ask the hard questions to yourself. Be your own devil's advocate. If you don’t, the market will do it for you.
Case Study: The browser extension noted earlier actually wasn’t a browser extension to start. It was a consumer-facing application. Upon asking the questions above, the answers were negative. Now, just because you aren’t getting the answers you’re looking for, doesn’t mean your product won’t be a success. It will just be harder. So, we decided to take it to phase 2 with high hopes.
2. Survey, Survey, Survey. After you ask yourself the questions above, it is important to ask your audience the right questions to gauge interest. Real interest.
Again, many of you have heard me write or speak about this. Many of you will also know, that I recommend two surveys (especially for digital products).
This first survey is a gauge for the general interest of the product. Google Forms or Survey Monkey makes this incredibly easy to do. Your goal here is to find 50–100 people in the target audience for your product to understand if they’d be truly interested in using it. I recommend 10 questions max and encourage the use of any rough sketches, wireframing, or images to provide context.
Need help finding that many people? Slack communities and Facebook groups are a great starting point. It's important not to spam people with your survey. Be a valuable member and then ask people for their honest opinion by partaking in your survey. For finding good Slack communities, I recommend using this resource: https://slofile.com/
I want to add that there is a difference between a survey respondent answering yes, and a survey respondent answering yes I’ll pay $5.00 for this. Work to get your survey respondents to put themselves into “buy” mode. Encourage them upfront to answer honestly. When I hunt out survey recipients, I now look for the folks that are most likely to be critical and say no. Then I get to dig into the “why” with them.
Case Study: We did this for our consumer-facing giving application. The results are shown in the screenshot below. An idea or a product that is a pain killer would score higher than this. The “I love the idea” and the “I would do it” categories would make up 50% plus of the results. Again, we still believed strongly in the product, understanding that it wasn’t a “pain killer” and continued pressing on to phase 3.
3. The landing page and Adwords
Now that we have a sense that people actually want to use your product, it’s time to see if people will actually download or get their wallets out for this. The best way to do that, in my opinion, is with a landing page and a Google Adwords account. We’ll start with the landing page.
The landing page is a simple web page that we can point users to and gauge if they are interested in our product. There are a number of services that make this really easy, but I’m going to recommend one of the following:
Product Hunt — New feature for Product Hunt, but they do a good job. Simple drag and drop set up and you can go live in the time it takes you to drink 2.5 cups of coffee.
Wordpress — If you’re a WP nut like I am, this is always a good option. To make this look good, the setup can take a little longer so setup will take you around 5 cups of coffee.
HubSpot — Paid solution but does a great job if you have this option. If you have a HubSpot account, you can get set up in 1 cup of coffee.
LaunchRock — This company has been around since I started building products 10 years ago. They make it easy and some major companies have been launched. You can get this set up in about 2 cups of coffee.
Once you choose your service, you’re going to set up a simple page that explains your product. Many landing pages will have an email signup form. For most, completing that email signup form is the indicator that people are interested in the product. But you’re not like most! You’re going to take it a step further to ensure this passes the wallet test (or the download test). Have your site viewers not only learn about your product but give them the option to add it to the cart and check out, or if it is a free digital product, the option to download it. Have them fill out the needed fields and hit that check out or download button. See if they commit! If they do, you can redirect them to a page that explains that the product is in its early stages and that you’ll contact them when the product or service goes live. This truly displays if your audience is willing to pay for your product or download it.
Now for the Adwords component. With your landing page set up, we now need to drive traffic to see if folks are interested. I find the best way of doing this is with Google Adwords. Set up an ad account and put together some search ads. Search ads are ads that will display at the top of Google results when people type in the keywords you’ve identified. This doesn’t have to break the bank. Set a budget of $10/day for 7 days and see the results. Remember, this can save you thousands of dollars and weeks of time in the long run, so make this small investment now. For a full tutorial on how to set up your Adwords account, watch this video here.
Case Study: For our consumer-facing giving app, this was the turning point or the moment of realization that this would be incredibly challenging. We built a landing page and set up ads. We pushed roughly 50 people to our website a day. Remember, these are people that are searching for the keywords we’d identified in our advertising. The result: Only 2 people clicked download. This was the moment of realization that this would be immensely challenging to get adoption. Again, this doesn’t mean that the product would not be successful. It just means that it will be immensely challenging to get adoption. At this point, we decided to make our pivot to the web extension that our product is today with a focus on B2B (business to business) rather than consumer-facing. We repeated steps 1–3 and the results were 10X better. These first three steps saved us tens of thousands in wasted dollars and months of time.
4. The Prototype
So you have a concept that you know people will download or buy. Great! Many will shoot straight to building their product out the gate. “Hire the developers, bring on the designers, let’s do this thing!” I recommend pumping the brakes. Before building anything, design a prototype (or if you’re doing a physical good, order a prototype). With the tech we have today, we can link screens together to create what would almost appear to be a fully working product. Invision is currently the tool I use to do this for digital products.
Invision allows you to take screens that you’ve designed and link the actions in each screen together to make something that looks and feels real. I’ve used this for mobile apps to full-blown B2B platforms. If you don’t have design skills, I recommend hiring a UI designer to take a stab at the screen designs for you so you can use Invision or a similar tool.
Working on a physical product? Get your designs and samples in before any production orders so they can be ready for survey #2 which I’ll discuss below.
I recommend building the prototype for three reasons. One: This gives you something much more tangible to gauge whether your audience would indeed use your product. Two: If you decide to move forward with development or physical order, the feedback you’ve received already for the prototype can be implemented in the design and save you thousands of dollars in re-work down the road. Three: It is much much easier and more time-efficient for a development or manufacturing team to build your product with the visuals and flow of how the final version should look and feel.
Case Study: Now that we had made the decision to build a browser extension along with a new focus on B2B, it was time to design out the prototype (we, of course, did this after completing steps 1–3). With the prototype, it allowed our developers to work substantially faster as well as make tweaks to the design pre-development to save us time and money.
5. Survey, Survey, Survey — V2
Now with a prototype in hand, it’s time to get it back into the hands of the folks that initially took your survey, as well as those that connected with you on your landing page. Ask the audience to put the prototype to the test and provide critical feedback on how it can be better. You’ll again want to ask them if they would REALLY pay money to use this product or download as part of the survey. Let them know you’ll be coming to them with a bill once it launches ;).
I also recommend UserTesting as a resource at this stage. This service gives you an audience that you can specify to test the app. Ideally, you can get 100–500 people to test your prototype and give you good feedback on whether you should continue progressing with the product.
Case Study: Similar to the case study section I noted above, we took our prototype to market and not only did a survey but scheduled calls and had folks screen share with us so we could actually see them walk through the experience. Watching a number of end-users actually use the experience was eye-opening for our team and also gave us feedback that we don’t think the users could have given us in a survey. In summary, spend as much time with your target audience as possible and study how they work with your product.
6. The Real MVP
So you have a successful prototype. Now it’s time to go back to one of our original questions. What is the absolute minimal product that you can build and take to market? I like to call it the Real MVP. Most will overbuild. For many of us, it’s in our nature and I’ve been incredibly guilty of overbuilding numerous times in my career. Some call it the Field of Dreams fallacy — “if you build it they will come”. Why is the Real MVP important? Because it will save you a <insert suggestive langue here> ton of time and money and get you to market fast. Why do you want to get to market fast? Because that is the only way we will prove product-market fit or adjust for product-market fit. The faster we can get your product or your side hustle to market, the faster you’ll be able to identify a fit.
I want to be clear. Just because you’ve identified product-market fit, doesn’t mean your product or hustle will be successful. A massive amount of time and energy will need to be invested still (back to one of my original questions) to gain actual market traction. It’s just much easier when you have product-market fit with an audience that needs or wants what you’ve built.
Case Study: We brought our MVP to market and learned a lot. Even after going through the prototype and user studies, there were adoption issues we didn’t expect nor could we plan for (we’re even working on some of these today). Having spent only a small amount of our budget, we quickly worked with our developers to adjust the functionality to simplify it even further and successfully serve our market. Products are never done, and we work every day to make this browser extension better to serve more users, and as a result, make our users more successful.
I hope you all found this helpful and that you go on to build immensely successful products and side hustles. If you practice these 6 steps, it will alleviate your risk substantially. I also hope you found the case study with the WeHero browser extension useful. The extension was built for a good cause and I hope you enjoy it!
In closing, for discussions like this, I like to end with a quote from Jim Collins that I think relates to what I’m saying above. “Fire Bullets, Then Cannonballs.” He uses this example from the military analogy of finding yourself at sea with a limited amount of gunpowder. If you fire a cannonball and use all of your powder and miss, you deplete your stockpile and die. If you fire bullets until you make the necessary adjustments to hit your target, then fire the cannonball, you succeed.
Get after it! — Ben
