Hey guys,
I wrote a blog post that I've received some feedback on that might be worth posting on WickedFire. Mostly though, I'd like your feedback on my perception of whether or not this is a good takeaway of idea validation.
This is taken from the Dev Blog in my signature.
This is not a success story about my very first software launch. In fact, if you visit the website mentioned in the following, you’ll be disappointed. What this article refers to are the lessons I learned in validating a software idea over the summer of 2012. In that sense, this is worth a read.
Step 1: The Green Light Signals
Basewives.com was a very simple, unoriginal idea. I wanted to create a classified listings website for military family members specific to their location at each military base. Before I dumped any time into planning and development, I did some initial research to find signals that this idea was worth moving forward with, at least to the next stage of validation. Here were my confirming signals:
Was there already a market for the idea?
Yes. Based on my research, there was already at least two Facebook pages created per military base devoted specifically for Buy, Sell, Trade activity amongst military family members. The total page/group member count exceeded 100,000 users, and they were all very active. While 100,000 people is hardly enough to consider something a valid market, I took into consideration the uniqueness of a military family situation (something I was able to do because I am essentially a member of this market).
Had someone already created a successful solution for this market’s problem?
Yes. This is a good thing. It is often much harder to market a new idea. I’ve read time and time again about venture capitalists not investing into virgin ideas because of the ease at which competition is able to see flaws from the outside and immediately replicate + upgrade the idea. CCarter of Wickedfire points out that Facebook was not the first social network, Microsoft was not the first GUI, and Google was not the first search engine. While you should be cognoscente of how saturated your market really is, moderate competition can be better than no competition. At least then the market and the idea has already been validated. In my case, there was only one competitor and I felt I could do better than they.
Did people think this was a good idea?
Yes. My wife joined many of the Facebook pages and groups, even of military bases nowhere near ours. She would pitch the concept, and the general consensus was positive. In fact, this is how we learned about the only competitor already providing this service. My initial searches in Google hadn’t turned anything up. While getting verbal feedback is great, I will waive a flag of caution about the actual weight of verbal feedback, which I’ll go into more detail about in a moment.
Lesson: Search for reliable signals. Does the market already exist? Does competition exist? Do relevant people like the idea?
Step 2: Build Frankenstein, Not Mona Lisa
I was “developing” Basewives by myself, and I was by no means the level of programmer that this project required. Instead, I decided to find pre-built scripts for what I wanted to do. I found a Pinterest clone script and hacked it to death with my non-existent understanding of PHP. I changed the look of it as not to feel too “Pinterest-y”. But I achieved the desired result within weeks and was only out $300 versus hiring out for $1,500+. The end result was far from my vision, but it was functional and it didn’t look terrible.
Lesson: McGuyver the Beta version of your idea first. The goal is to get it functional enough for feedback.
Step 3: Validation by Simulation
The amount of positive verbal feedback I received heavily outweighed the number of users willing to jump onto the Basewives bandwagon. It was frustrating. I wanted to slap everyone who thought it was such a great idea, but then were slow to adopt. It’s great when people are willing to consider your idea, but that still doesn’t mean they’ll move over to it. As it turns out, getting people to buy into your idea takes work.
Fortunately, I had created a landing page to collect e-mails so that I could notify fans of the idea once we launched. In a way, I think it kept them accountable for their initial reactions, and we had a very successful click-through-ratio on the e-mail launch campaign. As Trevor from Bluereach put it, “true validation needs a simulation of some kind.” The simulation does not need to look pretty. It just needs to work.
Lesson: You can’t always count on the things people say. Rest assured by the things people do.
Step 4: Create Validation Milestones
After launch, I created daily, weekly and monthly metrics to beat. I used my competitors as a reference. My long-term goal was to cater to every U.S. military base but my initial launch focused on the state of Hawaii. I looked at the Facebook pages and group member numbers. Individually, they each had between 500-1,500 members. I used that number span as a goal.
I wrote it down: 500+ member sign-ups in six weeks. I then divided that down to what it would mean for me daily, and implemented some marketing plays to drive the traffic, keeping note that every x number of traffic often equated to y number of sign-ups. It was through this validation period that I started to really understand the impact of my marketing campaigns. Not only that, I also pivoted and finally discovered a monetization plan beyond advertisements. I may write about the marketing plan or the monetization pivot another day, but for now they don’t really apply to this topic.
I reached my goal, and by the end of those six weeks, I had over 600 members, $100, and people were actively posting items. This does not mean the idea was a success. What this means is that if my understanding of my target market was correct and my six week validation milestone was accurately-defined, then I just met my first validation point. In that sense, it was time to scale.
During the time up to the six week milestone, I was also heavily encouraging user feedback and we were receiving quite a bit of it, good and bad. It wasn’t always easy coming with feedback though. At one point, we had to offer incentives to users for giving us feedback via social engagement and minor gift cards. In fact, a photo contest that required 2-3 sentences of feedback received a better response than the contest we ran requesting only feedback. Intradasting.
Lesson: Create accurately-defined validation milestones. Meet them, and scale. Fall short, and pivot or re-evaluate the definition of your milestone.
Conclusion
The biggest take away from this experience was in regards to using good judgement. Creating a skeleton of your big vision for the sake of shipping requires a good understanding of what’s essential and what can be left behind. Asking for and then delivering on customer feedback takes practice in identifying a nit-picky customer from an essential feature. If you poorly assess your market, you can’t expect your milestone definitions to truly equate to proven validation signals. Get out there and practice, and be prepared to pivot. And most importantly, don’t be afraid to ditch the idea. After all, that’s what this entire process was meant to determine.
I wrote a blog post that I've received some feedback on that might be worth posting on WickedFire. Mostly though, I'd like your feedback on my perception of whether or not this is a good takeaway of idea validation.
This is taken from the Dev Blog in my signature.
This is not a success story about my very first software launch. In fact, if you visit the website mentioned in the following, you’ll be disappointed. What this article refers to are the lessons I learned in validating a software idea over the summer of 2012. In that sense, this is worth a read.
Step 1: The Green Light Signals
Basewives.com was a very simple, unoriginal idea. I wanted to create a classified listings website for military family members specific to their location at each military base. Before I dumped any time into planning and development, I did some initial research to find signals that this idea was worth moving forward with, at least to the next stage of validation. Here were my confirming signals:
Was there already a market for the idea?
Yes. Based on my research, there was already at least two Facebook pages created per military base devoted specifically for Buy, Sell, Trade activity amongst military family members. The total page/group member count exceeded 100,000 users, and they were all very active. While 100,000 people is hardly enough to consider something a valid market, I took into consideration the uniqueness of a military family situation (something I was able to do because I am essentially a member of this market).
Had someone already created a successful solution for this market’s problem?
Yes. This is a good thing. It is often much harder to market a new idea. I’ve read time and time again about venture capitalists not investing into virgin ideas because of the ease at which competition is able to see flaws from the outside and immediately replicate + upgrade the idea. CCarter of Wickedfire points out that Facebook was not the first social network, Microsoft was not the first GUI, and Google was not the first search engine. While you should be cognoscente of how saturated your market really is, moderate competition can be better than no competition. At least then the market and the idea has already been validated. In my case, there was only one competitor and I felt I could do better than they.
Did people think this was a good idea?
Yes. My wife joined many of the Facebook pages and groups, even of military bases nowhere near ours. She would pitch the concept, and the general consensus was positive. In fact, this is how we learned about the only competitor already providing this service. My initial searches in Google hadn’t turned anything up. While getting verbal feedback is great, I will waive a flag of caution about the actual weight of verbal feedback, which I’ll go into more detail about in a moment.
Lesson: Search for reliable signals. Does the market already exist? Does competition exist? Do relevant people like the idea?
Step 2: Build Frankenstein, Not Mona Lisa
I was “developing” Basewives by myself, and I was by no means the level of programmer that this project required. Instead, I decided to find pre-built scripts for what I wanted to do. I found a Pinterest clone script and hacked it to death with my non-existent understanding of PHP. I changed the look of it as not to feel too “Pinterest-y”. But I achieved the desired result within weeks and was only out $300 versus hiring out for $1,500+. The end result was far from my vision, but it was functional and it didn’t look terrible.
Lesson: McGuyver the Beta version of your idea first. The goal is to get it functional enough for feedback.
Step 3: Validation by Simulation
The amount of positive verbal feedback I received heavily outweighed the number of users willing to jump onto the Basewives bandwagon. It was frustrating. I wanted to slap everyone who thought it was such a great idea, but then were slow to adopt. It’s great when people are willing to consider your idea, but that still doesn’t mean they’ll move over to it. As it turns out, getting people to buy into your idea takes work.
Fortunately, I had created a landing page to collect e-mails so that I could notify fans of the idea once we launched. In a way, I think it kept them accountable for their initial reactions, and we had a very successful click-through-ratio on the e-mail launch campaign. As Trevor from Bluereach put it, “true validation needs a simulation of some kind.” The simulation does not need to look pretty. It just needs to work.
Lesson: You can’t always count on the things people say. Rest assured by the things people do.
Step 4: Create Validation Milestones
After launch, I created daily, weekly and monthly metrics to beat. I used my competitors as a reference. My long-term goal was to cater to every U.S. military base but my initial launch focused on the state of Hawaii. I looked at the Facebook pages and group member numbers. Individually, they each had between 500-1,500 members. I used that number span as a goal.
I wrote it down: 500+ member sign-ups in six weeks. I then divided that down to what it would mean for me daily, and implemented some marketing plays to drive the traffic, keeping note that every x number of traffic often equated to y number of sign-ups. It was through this validation period that I started to really understand the impact of my marketing campaigns. Not only that, I also pivoted and finally discovered a monetization plan beyond advertisements. I may write about the marketing plan or the monetization pivot another day, but for now they don’t really apply to this topic.
I reached my goal, and by the end of those six weeks, I had over 600 members, $100, and people were actively posting items. This does not mean the idea was a success. What this means is that if my understanding of my target market was correct and my six week validation milestone was accurately-defined, then I just met my first validation point. In that sense, it was time to scale.
During the time up to the six week milestone, I was also heavily encouraging user feedback and we were receiving quite a bit of it, good and bad. It wasn’t always easy coming with feedback though. At one point, we had to offer incentives to users for giving us feedback via social engagement and minor gift cards. In fact, a photo contest that required 2-3 sentences of feedback received a better response than the contest we ran requesting only feedback. Intradasting.
Lesson: Create accurately-defined validation milestones. Meet them, and scale. Fall short, and pivot or re-evaluate the definition of your milestone.
Conclusion
The biggest take away from this experience was in regards to using good judgement. Creating a skeleton of your big vision for the sake of shipping requires a good understanding of what’s essential and what can be left behind. Asking for and then delivering on customer feedback takes practice in identifying a nit-picky customer from an essential feature. If you poorly assess your market, you can’t expect your milestone definitions to truly equate to proven validation signals. Get out there and practice, and be prepared to pivot. And most importantly, don’t be afraid to ditch the idea. After all, that’s what this entire process was meant to determine.
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