Ultimate Cheatsheet to validate all your ideas before MVP
I have a lot of ideas. Every now and then, when I go out to grocery store for shopping, meet a friend at cafe, check out new trending apps -these amazing ideas pops up in my mind with a promise to be my next big thing. Sounds familiar? If you are as ambitious as I am, I am pretty sure these situations applies to you as well. And, its good. I mean everything starts with idea, right? But, there is a little problem. All my ideas are dear to me and I think most of them have potential. And I don’t want to select top 3 and dump all others. Without proper research, I could dump my golden goose. I want to give fair chance to most of them and then work on the promising ones.
I know its extremely difficult if not impossible to work on all good ideas. How do you go about working on all these ideas and give them fair chance to succeed? How do you ensure proper execution of your idea? Or at least how do you go about creating an MVP to validate your idea? But, wait ! Do you even need an MVP to prove that your solution is really solving someone’s problem? If not, then how can you go around validating your idea even before you write a single piece of code?
Well, it is possible to validate ‘almost’ every idea you have before you start working on it. Key is to do it within a strict deadline. After some try and error, I finally compiled a cheatsheet that lets me iterate quickly over my ideas and prove if they deserve any genuine efforts towards MVP. I hope this framework will provide some value to you in your efforts to solve problems worth solving.
So, without further ado, here is the sequence of steps that I follow for going from idea to MVP. It normally takes me somewhere between couple of weeks to go through all these steps and see what’s working and what’s not.
Here we go…
1) Find a problem not idea
Goal : Find an unfulfilled problem in a niche market with some scaling potential
I don’t need to say much for this topic, but I would just advice on not to look for that next big idea of a new social network, especially if you are bootstrapping. For bootstrapped products, “Non-paying User Traction” does more harm than good. You will not able to sustain burn rate without any revenue unless you are backed by VC.
Best bet for bootstrappers is to find a problem they can solve in niche market.
2) Transform your idea into concrete Business Plan
Goal : Come up with business plan to validate our idea
This is the first line of your idea validation. For entrepreneurs, an idea is only good if they can make money out of it. Before you think of proceeding further, ask yourself these questions —
- Who is my target customer? or customer segment?
- Does my target customer really have this problem that I am trying to solve? One way to answer this question is discussed in the next topic
- Why can’t my customer solve this problem today?
- Who else is solving this problem today? (Basically, who are my competitors?) If you can’t find any competitor, them may be it is not the problem worth solving.
- How will I make money? If you can’t figure out a way to make money and sustain, then don’t bother going forward and find another problem to solve.
- If I have competitors, what are they missing out that I can leverage?
- What is the biggest risk that can make my business fail? (For example, if your core offering is heavily dependent on third-party services, then your biggest risk would be the destructive change in their business model or them going bankrupt)
Ideally, you should be able to answer most of the questions above. (If not, go back to step 1 and find another problem to solve) If you have all the answers, then it means you have transitioned from the idea phase to something that can potentially be your next big thing. But, wait up! This is just the beginning.
3) Find your Product-Market Fit
Goal : Verify if people really wants what you are selling
In this step, we get out of our cocoon and into the real world to prove that whatever problem you envisaged in your brain, also exists in the real world.
We start by creating our online business front aka “Landing Page”(a single page website that explains our offering to the potential customers).
Now, what do we need for landing page?
- Web Domain
- Web Hosting
- Clean and precise Web Design
- To the point content that describes the problem and our solution (i.e. our product)
- Email subscription
Web Domain :
How to go about finding selecting a web domain? If you are not next Snapchat or Facebook, then go old school. Don’t go after some fancy name and try looking for some words that describes your service or product. Even better, use keyword planner tool and look for most searched keywords that fits your service offering. Try long tail keywords. They are good for SEO. For example, if your offering is on demand home cleaning service, then go for homecleaning.com or on-demand-cleaning.com.
Long-tail keywords in domain names will help with SEO.
I hope you know how important is SEO to succeed in any business nowadays. But, by all means if you feel you want some fancy name for your company, then at least try to find some shorter name with fits with your offering (in this case, clean.it has a nice ring to our fake cleaning service)
Web Hosting :
This is straight forward. There is no hidden plays here. But, whichever hosting provider you choose, check out their track record and user reviews.
If you are a technical person, you can opt for hosting your own server as well in one of the cloud providers like Digital Ocean, Heroku or AWS. Or go with Wordpress hosting.
Web Design :
Your goal should be to explain your users how are you solving their problem. So, your design should be clean and clear. Try using some icons or mockups that explains your product in a visually appealing way. There are many good blog posts out there explaining how to design your landing pages so I won’t go more deep into this.
Web Content :
If you don’t explain your visitors clearly how are you solving their problem, you will never see them again on your site. You have lost your potential paying customer and with him/her goes many potential word of mouth referrals. Explain clearly what you are doing to help them and preferably step by step. Also, keep in mind SEO applies to this content as well. So, do keyword research and optimize your content for better SEO.
Subscribe By Email :
Perhaps the most important step of all. Let’s assume you put your best efforts and managed to convince your site visitors to stick your landing page and navigate around. And perhaps you are solving their problem. But, you don’t have the product ready yet for them to use. You have not even started. But, you want to sell to someone once your product is ready. Well, this is your chance. Register with any email provider like MailChimp and place a email subscription form at the bottom of the page, ensuring that your visitors have already understood what you are offering them and there is a high chance for them to subscribe to your email list.
4) Spread the word
Goal : To increase relevant traffic to your Landing page
If you build it, they will come. This only happens in hollywood movies, not in real life. Launching the landing page is only half battle won towards validating your idea. Real work begins now. But, things are not so scary. Since, you already established who is your target customer — its time to find where they hang out.
One of the best channel is Social Media. Start online by joining social media groups in your target niche market. If your product appeals to teenagers, you will find them on Instagram and Snapchat. If they are more niche users, your may find them in subreddits or Pinterest. If they are in tech and enterprenuership, they are probably hanging out over at Hacker News or IndieHackers.
Your customers are out there, find them.
Once you find proper platform, share link to your landing page. Reply to the comments of unsatisfied users with the link to your landing page if you are solving their problems. Remember to be respectful and don’t spam.
Other channel is Content Marketing. It is a great medium to organically grow your site traffic. But, it can be passive and slow which is why I prefer first approach. But, content marketing works well when you have launched the product and creating long term authority and building new relationships.
Whichever approach you choose, keep certain deadline to gauge user interest. But, within that deadline do your best to promote your landing page. If you don’t see much interest in your product, then probably its time to take a back step and review your idea and business plan. It might make sense to cut losses and move on to next idea or to improve your existing value proposition and try to reengage your audience.
If you fail at step 2 or 4, discard that idea and move on to next one. Rinse and Repeat.
5) Start working on the MVP with a strict deadline
If you see enough traction in form of email subscribers in previous step then you have validated that you are solving the correct problem and people are willing to try your solution. Next step is to start working on your MVP with strict deadline. Why deadline? Because, as it happened to me and many of you probably, once you start working on a product, you try to make it perfect and/or add new features that might be good to have but not absolutely necessary. By defining your product release deadline you ensure that you are not losing momentum you built in your early adopters (i.e. your email list).
Stick to the absolutely necessary core features and ship it as soon as they are implemented
That’s it. This is the core framework to bring your ideas into market and transforming them into products that people use. I would like to know your thoughts about it. Are you doing something different? Is it working for you?
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