Ok, I have to come clean. I don’t own a crystal ball. (They were sold out in Diagon Alley the last time I checked.)
But I have launched a lot of products.
Tip 1: Don’t let people take photos of you while you’re talking, you’ll always look weird.
If you’ve come of to one of our annual talks at Google campus then you’ll know that I’m the sort of person who has a new app idea every 5 minutes.
In fact, I should probably turn my Twitter into an ideas feed for entrepreneurs. It would be like a soup kitchen for the “idea-less”.
At the App Brewery, we specialise in teaching skills that turn ideas into products. So we meet a lot of entrepreneurs.
Many of the entrepreneurs I meet are very attached to their idea. I’ve heard the following sentence more often then I’ve found a sufficiently hoppy beer*.
“Hey Ma'am I really need your advice on my idea. Can you sign a non-disclosure agreement?” — An Entrepreneur
As my more eloquent VC friend puts it — “Anyone who’s launched a successful company, knows how much blood, sweat and tears are involved. A founder who’s obsessed with keeping their idea secret is falling at the first hurdle”.
There have been countless times when I’ve been helped in the most unexpected of ways. All from sharing my ideas freely.
It takes more than a great idea to build a successful product. And first-to-market is not always as important as you think it is.
Google Orkut, the world’s first social network.
Facebook was not the first social network (remember Orkut?). And Google was not the first search engine.
Instead of focusing on idea secrecy. The real focus should be on idea validation.
Yes, there’s a way of seeing if people will actually buy your product way before you lay down a single line of code.
If I ask 100 failed startups, would you have taken the opportunity to save yourselves all that time and money and figured out right at the start if people wanted your product? What do you think they would say?
Don’t get swept into the first-to-market obsession. Get serious about product-market-fit instead.
So what’s the best way of validating your idea?
Step 1 — Build a simple landing page.
Step 2 — Drive traffic towards it.
Step 3 — Look at your conversion rates.
Your conversion rate is calculated by dividing the number of signups from the total number of people who land on your page.
This is like time-travel. You’re in the future where your product is already made and you’re promoting it. How many people, once they know about will actually sign up?
Which feature are they potentially most excited about?
You can figure out so much valuable information from this simple experiment and potentially save yourself money, time, energy and your sanity by doing this one simple thing. (If I were Buzzfeed, the title of this article would be “The one weird trick that will save your startup”).
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If you want to learn more about practical idea validation and step-by-step instructions on how you can build your own landing page, you’ll find all of that and more in our online courses for entrepreneurs.
App Marketing Course Curriculum
Top comments (1)
"If I ask 100 failed startups, would you have taken the opportunity to save yourselves all that time and money and figured out right at the start if people wanted your product? What do you think they would say?"
My biggest surprise as a startup marketer and an agency owner for early stage startups in the past 10 years: the amount of investors that put money without seeing validation proof - or running validation measures on their own...