"Money – cold, hard cash – on the other hand. That’s the ultimate form of validation."
This is priceless especially considering how much effort goes into writing a book or creating a SaaS product.
This is priceless especially considering how much effort goes into writing a book or creating a SaaS product.
It gradually got around 200 "pre-signups", and I used the list to contact people as well and verify my assumptions.
I will write a blog post about that soon!
In all cases, I would contact people (by email/phone/whatever) to engage a discussion and ask the "True Question" :)
I do agree that "I'm interested" is absolutely not the same as "I'm paying for this, here's my CC number".
I'd seriously think about that 30x500 course if I were you. (Thibault is alum.)
The biggest chunk of the course is devoted to making sure there's a "commitment to cash" BEFORE spending a dime. And that includes $$$ adwords.
So, yes, we thought we could validate the idea with an Ad campaign, but we did not do it right, I think. We did not measure anything significant at all, and what we did is gather an "I'm interested" list. You are right that perhaps the best ways to validate a product is to ask real people - like asking quite bluntly "Would you pay $30 per month for this product, with this certain USP?", or even "Would you pay me $100 upfront to build this product?". That takes a lot more guts than just setting up a landing page and an adwords campaign, but I see that we should do it.
That's not what I said. Ensuring commitment the way you mentioned doesn't quite work because of divergence between what people say and what people do. The latter is by far the more reliable, agreed?
The 30x500 course teaches advanced 360-degree market study where you learn what people actually do and what they so badly wished they were doing instead. (So yes, you'll learn how to read between the lines, among other things.) The results of that market study forms the most robust foundation to building a value offering that has buy-in baked-in.
p.s. The above is why you'd never hear about the need to "validate a product [idea]" among 3x5ers. The assumptions behind that expression are just wrong to begin with.
After that, I just started collecting emails, asking the list members qualitative questions, and honing copy by testing.
If you started with an idea for a book and no audience demanding it, you should really execute the whole custdev process in one form or another to verify demand. Pre-sales is a great avenue for that.