Use This PROVEN Formula to Validate Your Next Startup Idea

when I first started building startups I would spend months often times literally 6 months of nights and weekends writing code in the veritable basement it was actually a desk in my living room but you get the idea I wasn't talking to customers I wasn't talking to prospects cuz that really wasn't a common thing back then so then I would launch almost always to crickets it's a lot harder than you would think to build something that anyone cares about so if you're an aspiring founder with a handful of ideas but no idea what to do next this video is going to walk you through my two 20200 framework of how to validate your next startup idea so you don't waste months of your time building the wrong thing and if you stick around till the end I'll tell you exactly which books I would read to learn more about the topics I cover in this video I'm Rob Walling I've started six companies five of them bootstrapped I've written four books on entrepreneurship and I've invested in more than 170 startups so before I dig in to the 220 200 framework I'd like to talk a bit about startup validation because there's a lot of myths and miscon inceptions around it first thing I want to say is that you're never going to get to 100% validation you will never be certain that an idea will work no matter how much validation you do there's always going to be a shadow of a doubt and usually a lot more than that I like to say if you can get to 50 60 or even 70% certainty and even that's kind of a squishy thing like how do you define that but it's there's a mental gut feel of yeah I'm more certain than I was yesterday I'm more certain than I was last week and at a certain point it just levels out and you get this feeling like I'm not learning anything anymore and I need to take that next step and move into probably building something for people to look at a big question we're trying to address with validation is how are you going to get in front of your future customers because if you can't get people to talk to you today about the problem you're trying to solve how are you going to get them to talk to you once you have something to sell I often find that Builders makers like myself the easy part is building and we just want to go into a basement and code for 6 months because that's what we know how to do but but going out and talking to customers is a scary thing if you build it they will come is not going to happen you have to lead people to your product you have to do the marketing and build something people want and that's what validation is trying to do is get a sense of how hard is it to find people to talk to before you have a product because if you can't get them to talk to you now how are you going to find them after you've invested months and months of building something that you don't even know if they want I also want to talk about times where you may not need to validate anything there are times where it's a really simple build and if you can get an MVP live in 20 or 40 hours of time that you know often times you might spend that much validating so if you could actually get something into the market in that amount of time I might consider that the validation it's when something's going to take hundreds of hours to build that you want to shortcut that and get a better idea that you're headed in the right direction now I also find that some software developers use this as an excuse to just go build and not talk to people cuz that of course is the scary part so be realistic about how long you think it might take you to get an MVP to Market so how do you know if an idea is validated well you don't this isn't a blueprint it's just a framework that gives you ideas and thoughts about how to be a little more confident in what you're building and there are different ways to validate we're going to dive into today you can put up a landing page and send people to it and measure stuff and talk to customers or you can do direct Outreach and talk to folks I did it via email Jason Cohen the founder of WP engine I believe reached out on LinkedIn and email and then actually did Zoom calls with folks and so if you think about having a bunch of conversations at the point where I had 11 people telling me yeah I would be willing to use drip if you built what you're talking about at least give it a try over the next 3 months I got 11 yeses Jason Cohen got 40 yeses before he launched WP engine which is now a unicorn it is literally a billion doll company the right answer is probably somewhere in that range 11 to 40 I mean I think if you have three yeses probably not enough I think if you have a 100 yeses you've put in a lot of work but have you learned anything past that 40th yes so with that let me talk about the 22200 idea validation framework the reason it's called that is it's the amount of hours that it takes at each of the three steps of validation so the first step is a 2hour validation process this is using the 5pm framework which I'm going to talk about in a second I've also talked about this in a prior video and doing things like SEO research then the second step is the 20 the 20 hours of conversations or building landing pages this involves having warm or cold conversations or or doing the landing page approach that I talked about earlier or maybe a combination of the two like I did with drip and then the third the 200 is approximately again these are all approximations it's a framework but 200 hours spent actually building something building that mvp doesn't necessarily need to be code but it's getting something into the hands of your customers to start the iteration cycle so you have an idea what the 22200 framework is let's start with the two two hours of validation I talked about the 5:00 p.m idea prevalidation framework just a couple minutes ago it involves looking at the problem the purchaser the pricing model the market product founder fit and pain to validate I can literally spend 30 or 40 minutes just talking through those steps if you want to hear an in-depth overview of the 5pm ID validation framework head to episode 628 of startups for the rest of us and that episode also tells you how to download a PDF explanation that dives further into this validation but the idea is that you can do this in less than 2 hours the other part of this first step is SEO keyword research so thinking where are there public conversations that you can learn from Twitter Reddit Facebook groups is there paid traffic you can drive Google Facebook YouTube you're not trying to actually drive it yet you are going to keyword tools or you are searching in these groups to figure out are people talking about this paino where do they hang out and what kind of search traffic if any is available for the product that you're trying to build if people are not searching for it realize that you are going to have to go seek them out so there's going to be a lot of cold Outreach and a lot of making yourself visible in their spaces and so you can do that today in The Next Step the 20 hour step where you go into those spaces and you see if anyone cares about this problem or you run Google ads or you try to rank for organic Search terms but in this step you're just researching it to try to get a broad idea of the landscape that you're trying to enter into with this idea that you want to build the nice part about the 2hour validation is let's say you have five different ideas you can do 2-hour validation on all of them and pick the one or two that resonates with you most to potentially take to The Next Step which is of course the 20-hour validation step this is where you talk to people you start by having warm conversations you go to your audience whether it's Twitter whether it's Facebook groups whether it's going to your email Rolodex so to speak do people even use that term anymore do you if you're under do you even know what a Rolodex is but you get the idea you go to the people that you know who might have this problem or might have this need that you're thinking about solving cuz remember when an entrepreneur comes to me these days and says I have an idea for a startup for a SAS app I say don't tell me your idea tell me what problem it solves and for whom and you may not be 100% certain who the ideal customer profile is but you can take a guess and this step allows you to have a lot of conversations and try to narrow that down and figure out who has the burning problem who are going to be my first Early Access customers and who are more lukewarm about it so with warm conversations you can work your network or you can work your audience and what I was just talking about was working your network it's the people you know now if you have an audience let's say you have a podcast or you have a YouTube channel you got to be a little careful because there's something called The Curse of the audience which is where people want to be your friend or they want to encourage you and so they will tell you they have a desire to use something when in fact they may not and so you have to be pretty careful in this early stage a audiences are not the best for building SAS apps they're great for building info products and selling content courses and information you have to tread a little carefully if you have an audience when Jason Cohen who I mentioned prior founder of WP engine did this he reached out to Wordpress Consultants on LinkedIn and he since he was building WP engine which targeted WordPress folks he made a bunch of connections and contacted people and just had conversations the other way to do this cold is to find places where people talk about the problem online right I mentioned earlier Reddit Facebook groups potentially Hacker News although I'm a little dubious about that Twitter can you even offer to pay for conversations with experts if you're going to be selling to Wordpress folks and their Consultants I know Jason Cohen offered to pay their hourly rate to speak with him for an hour so you kind of make it a no-brainer most people actually won't take you up on that they'll do it for free but it's always an opportunity that you can take advantage of another example I have of a Founder who did a ton of cold calls it was 50 or 60 cold calls to find their startup idea is the co-founder of senior place and I interviewed him in startups for the rest of us episode 589 you can listen to that interview about a software engineer who made a kajillion cold calls and they found the idea for their now successful startup that has been funded by Tiny Seed it's pretty incredible story and if you want to find out more about how to do that listen to episode 589 now the other way to do 20h hour validation is to do it with a landing page and I say this other way like you can have the cold and warm conversations as as one leg of the stool and you can use a landing page or you can do one or the other I've seen both work I personally tend to use both since I'm a marketer I like to have a landing page up and if you think you're going to have a lower touch funnel for this product it's a good early test to build a landing page on the page you want to communicate the value you're going to provide or the problem that you're going to solve you're trying to communicate a value proposition and then you need to think about if I already had a full-blown product and I was selling it what strategies would I use to drive traffic to that landing page I get this question what strategies you use well it's the same strategies you'll use when you launch so if you can't answer that now you need to think about it right so you buy a book like the SAS Playbook I outlined the 20 B2B SAS marketing strategies and you go through I call it the three Factor framework but you can also buy the book traction by Gabriel Weinberg and you look at how you would potentially Drive traffic whether it's SEO or ads or cold Outreach or LinkedIn Outreach you know there are a lot of different strategies to do this obviously outside the scope of this video but I have covered that in my books and in other episodes on this show and on the landing page I'm going to have an attention grabbing headline maybe a subtitle that communicates the value and email capture and what I'm trying to do is communicate this is the problem that I see this is what I'm going to do to solve it although I don't go into Super depth and then I have an email capture widget and the purpose is not to build this massive launch list although that's great it's even if you only collect 20 or 30 emails you then reach out to those people and you say do you have this problem how much would you be willing to pay to solve it and how would you prefer that I solve it cuz sometimes you know you have a problem and and an idea of a solution but often times your potential customers can give you better ideas of how to solve the problem and lastly we have the 200 hour step of the 220 200 framework I actually just released a video that talked all about how to build an MVP and the different options you have whether it's no code whether it's human automation or whether you're writing code and you can check that out hopefully there's a link in the upper left of this video and certainly we'll link it up in the show notes for this one but what I want you to take away is don't jump to the 200 hour validation because that can be a huge waste of time if you don't do the two and the 20 beforehand in a second I'm going to give you two books that I would read as next steps if you want to dive deeper into this topic before I do that I want to let you know about the best online community for bootstrap SAS Founders it's called microf connect it's an amazing community of supportive Founders we have more than 7,000 Founders and aspiring Founders in the community Community microcom connect.com if you want to check it out we have a free tier so you can come in and look around and we have a ton of folks participating it's heavily moderated and as I said I believe it is the best community for bootstrap SAS Founders in the world so now if I was going to dive deeper into 22200 and frankly trying to validate startup ideas I would read two books the first is my first book called start small stay small it was published in 2010 so parts of it are a little dated but I talk a lot about building landing pages capturing emails doing SEO keyword research and it can be a great mindset shift for developers who usually think build first but start small st small talks about market and marketing first and the second book I would be looking to read is called deploy empathy by Michelle Hansen and this talks all about how to talk to customers and potential customers now it covers the gamut whether you have a full-blown product and you're talking to people in support or whether you are pre validating or trying to validate an idea this book can be an invaluable resource to you as you're trying to figure out exactly what questions should I be asking when you tell me to talk to customers if you've watched this video and you feel like you're ready to take the next step into creating an MVP make sure you check out this next video that I mentioned earlier where I deep dive into what I think you ought to include in an MVP and also what I think you can get away without make sure you like And subscribe to get more content like this every week thanks so much for watching

Channel: MicroConf

Views: 12,989

Keywords: MicroConf, Saas, validation process, idea validation, validation, saas ideas, validate your saas idea, process validation, saas startup, product validation, validate your startup idea, idea validation process, startup validation, saas validation, startup validation process, how to validate ideas, how to validate idea, idea validation startup, idea validation framework, startup company, validate your business idea, validate your startup, business idea validation

Id: d9uCqKEeJbY

Length: 13min 23sec (803 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 17 2024