I have been big fan of small feedback loops in development and research. This mindset will be beneficial if you work machine learning. After reading the Start small, stay small book, the most important one from my takeaways was the way how I can implement the feedback loop mindset in the early stages of a business.

What others do

I cherry-picked some technics from Microconf's survey to get an overview.

  • 33% Built a prototype or MVP
  • 20% Asked their audience
  • 9% No validation
  • 9% Pre-sales
  • 9% Verbal commitments
  • 7% Copied a competitor
  • 7% Landing page

Most of the time building an MVP costs too much time. By definition an MVP delivers value for the customer. That means you created the first version of your product. Therefore, you will make money from it if you reach the market. But there can be a huge chance that the market does not exist or is too small. You should follow the causality, and you should build your product after you have signals about that you can find paying customer.

Having an audience is an unfair advantage. No validation is not validation. Pre-sales is a two-edged sword, I would skip that now. Instead, in this post I'm highlighting the last 3 technics.

Landing page

Create a mini sales site for your (unstarted) product. Most of the paying customers are not who see your product at first time. Therefore, the goal of your sales site is to convince the reader that your product is worth of their attention. But convincing to buy it immediately is an irrational acceptance. Just convince them to check the updates and subscribe on the product's newsletter on the landing page.

Rob's advices in the Start small, stay small book:

In a successful sales website, every page has a single, primary call to action. That is, an action you want your user to take.
Further best practices for the Sales Site:

  • Everything should be within 2 clicks.
  • Make buttons look like buttons. Make your buttons so clickable that people can't help but click them. :D
  • No One reads. Text is a terrible selling tool; audio, video and images are always better.

The most popular no-code solution for this is the Webflow. It is worth not just in the case when you lack of coding skill, but you can save time on web design and the deployment / hosting parts too. You may avoid the sales site building if you organize online meetups or presentation in the topic of your business idea. And you can estimate the number of potential customers based on the number of viewers.

You need traffic to your site, read some tips about how

Rob's video mentions some channels that you can use generate traffic on your sales site.

Beyond the traffic you can get, there are many useful feedbacks about your idea on the channels above. For further tricks you can read the instructions on Growthlist.

Verbal commitments

You can make cold calls, just scheduling coffee with people who may be interested in your product on LinkedIn. But you can ask the opinions in your network. An example for an email from Rob that you can send to someone in your network:

"I have a question for you: would you be up for giving me your thoughts on an idea that I'm exploring?

[2-line description]

I'm not looking for general feedback, but more of a 'would you pay $X per month for this service if it had features...?'"

Reimplement something that has been existed

This is a sneaky lifehack. You can skip the idea validation part by this. As a company increases the feature set of its product, its ability to focus on specific use cases is decreased. So, if you find an existing products' use-case  that you would like to rebuild better and offer it cheaper, then you will be able to sell. The demand for that is already proven by the existence of the feature in another profitable product.

Where you can browse existing SaaS companies?

I recommend this video, if you are interested in this way.