marketing, market-research, agileI’ve recently been looking into validating a business idea and read the book “Start Small, Stay Small”, which gives a lot of tips on what to do to build a successful software company as a one man team. Part of it is to validate that there’s a market by building an email list prior to launching / building. The goal is to find out whether or not the conversion rate of the mailing list sign up form is substantial enough to execute the idea.
I’d love some insight from people who have done this before, with perhaps a loose formula for steps they always take prior to actually building the product. Since this would be a one / two person venture, assume that the budget is ~$500 (with no investor funding).
To be more concrete, let’s say I want to open a website for tents. Where would I go from here to get traffic to test the conversion rate?
An example of some things to do would be:
Or maybe put $75 into a press release service that will publish news of my product into well known channels?
Would love to hear ideas if anyone has any experience.
The question you are asking is very closely related to the concept of "Minimum Viable Product" which is discussed in a book called "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries. Here is a website with some of the principles of "The Lean Startup" described.
J. Roibal as a very good suggestion go read that!
But as a person who doesn’t have a lot of money for ads and such. I think your approach will depend on what kind of website/software/others you are doing. If your website is about tents a good approach is to use Google ads for your website is selling goods that are specific to a certain kind of people. (This is only if you have the money for it)
If on the other hand your startup is about a new social app that you want to launch. I would suggest to go directly to Facebook/twitter build up a community of people that are interested in your app and then ask them to participate in a beta test. Inviting people to be able to USE a product for the first time and be one of the first to use it is one of the many ways you can attract people’s attention. Build up so Hype! Post some teaser of what the app will look like. Make people believe that this new product will be the next Instgram, Snapchat, etc. The best way to build a community, I think, is to start by telling your friends about it. Get them to tell theirs and so forth.
There are a million ways you can get peoples’ attention to use your product and 90% of them are completely free.
That is why I suggest maybe to try the free option first like Facebook/Twitter even if you are selling tents on a website. This platform is completely free and very low risk. If it doesn’t work, go to the other options.
That is my humble opinion
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