Wondering why you should even listen to me?
My name is Timothy Bramlett and I am a former Senior Software Engineer turned Product Guy who lives in Austin, Texas.
In the corporate world I lead a Software Incubation and Innovation Team for HP. On the side though I build bootstrapped (no funding) products like Notifier.so and GetValidation.co (this site).
If you’re wondering how I got into this I have basically spent the past 10 years building a lot of failed side projects. 🤣
All of these mistakes have taught me a lot though and I have even had some success with an affiliate marketing (SEO) project and now with Notifier.
My guiding philosophy with any Product I create is to provide an experience that truly solves a pain point in your life and to do so in an honest and authentic way. So feedback is very important to me and please send it whenever you can.
If you would liked to connect with me, you an do so on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Why should you validate before you build?
Validating your startup idea before diving into building it is super important for a few key reasons. It helps you make sure people actually want what you’re offering and lowers the chances of failure. Here’s why you should validate first:
You need to know if there’s a real demand for your product or service. Validating helps you avoid creating something nobody wants, saving you from wasting time, effort, and money.
Building stuff takes time and resources. If you validate your idea first, you can spot issues and gather feedback to make changes before investing a ton of resources. It’s all about being efficient and smart with your time and money.
All businesses come with risks, but validating your idea first helps you minimize them. By making sure there’s demand and refining your idea based on feedback, you boost your chances of success and avoid common mistakes.
The step by step plan for validating a startup idea 🚀
- Come up with an idea
- Talk to people about the pain point you have identified. Do they have it?
- Create a Landing Page
- Use a platform like Gumroad or (GetValidation.co when it’s ready) to sell beta access
- Get traffic to the landing page!
- If enough people sign up you build 👷‍♂️
- More resources I recommend
Sounds easy right? Let’s get started.
1. How to Come Up With an Idea
For some people coming up with their startup idea is the hardest part of the entire process! In my experience, this is because they simply do not have the experience in noticing pain points and understanding how realistic it is to solve them.
Keep a physical or digital notebook with you at all times
As a bootstrapper, you’ll likely find that inspiration can strike at any moment. Whether you’re in the middle of a meeting, commuting to work, or even taking a shower, a great idea may suddenly come to mind.
Having an idea notebook or digital note-taking app readily available ensures that you can immediately record your thoughts, preventing potentially valuable insights from being forgotten.
I like to use a combination of Notion and Todoist. But really you can use anything including the notes app on your phone.
Review your list of ideas
Set aside time on a regular basis to review your ideas notebook. Reflect on the ideas you’ve jotted down and consider how they might fit into your current startup plan or how they could be developed further. This practice will help you refine your ideas and keep your creative juices flowing.
Always ask yourself, how will this idea make money?
The last thing you want to do is create an idea that has absolutely no way to be monetized. It’s an unfortunate reality of life and that in order to be sustainable your bootstrapped startup needs to be able to make money money.
So for every one of the ideas in your ideas notebook, be sure to include some thoughts on how that idea can make money.
I always recommend B2B ideas that target the SMB Market
Personally, I have not found a lot of success in the bootstrap startup scene whenever, I try to target consumer use cases.
You have to remember that consumers have been trained for the past 30 years to expect software to be free. Consumers are perfectly fine with giving up their data privacy in exchange for free software and I have found it it’s very hard to break consumers out of this pattern.
You might instantly think about targeting large enterprise corporations, right?
You may think to yourself that corporations have a lot of money. While this is true, it’s also extremely difficult to sell to a large enterprise. The sales cycle is incredibly long, and you should expect a lot of handholding.
In general, you’ll spend a lot of money trying to target large enterprises. Additionally, there’s a lot of competition in this space because it’s the pot of gold that everyone wants.
In my opinion, SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses) are a much better target market for bootstrapped startups. The reason being that many SMBs don’t have extensive software evaluation and purchase processes. Often, individual departments make their own choices about the software they want to use, and they usually buy it using company credit cards instead of going through a massive approval process with purchase orders.
Furthermore, SMBs tend to be much more modern in the types of software they want to buy. They often seek the latest and greatest software because many times, they’re developing software themselves and understand the value of paying for innovative software solutions.
Is this idea approachable for a bootstrapper?
Another question you always want to ask yourself is whether the idea is approachable for a bootstrapped startup.
As a bootstrapper, if you’re working on the idea alone or with a small team, handling tasks such as coding and marketing, you need to choose ideas that are realistically approachable.
In fact, it’s often best to start with the smallest possible idea you can find. For instance, trying to create the next great search engine might be too ambitious, but developing a plugin for an existing search engine could be a more manageable project for a startup.
An example of this approach can be seen in the story of my friend Maxime. He chose to develop a Twitter A/B testing tool called Birdie.so for his bootstrapped startup. When building it, he began with the simplest functionality possible. Unfortunately, Maxim didn’t anticipate Twitter’s API pricing changes, which jeopardized his startup’s future. However, he did follow the principle of selecting a highly approachable idea for a small team and started with basic functionality.
Remember to consider the scope of your startup idea and whether it’s suitable for a bootstrapped approach. This can help ensure that you and your team can realistically bring your concept to life without becoming overwhelmed.
Competition can be a good validation signal
Believe it or not, competition in your chosen market can be a positive sign. It validates that there’s demand for the product or service you’re offering and that others see potential in the same space. Instead of being discouraged by competition, use it as a signal to refine your startup idea and find your unique selling points.
Competitors can be a valuable source of information. Study their strengths and weaknesses, pricing strategies, customer reviews, and marketing techniques. This can help you understand what works well and what pitfalls to avoid in your own business strategy.
Competition encourages you to find your unique selling proposition (USP). What can you offer that sets you apart? It could be a specific feature, better customer service, or even a more attractive price point. Focus on your USP to help you stand out and attract customers.
2. Talk to people about the pain point you have identified
One of the best ways to validate your startup idea is to talk to people and find out if they share the same problem your product or service aims to solve. By engaging with potential customers and relevant communities, you can gather valuable insights and better understand your target audience.
Where to Find People
You can find potential customers on various platforms like Twitter, Reddit, or niche forums where communities relevant to your idea gather. These platforms are full of people who can provide feedback and share their experiences, helping you fine-tune your startup concept.
Engaging with Your Target Audience
Don’t be afraid to ask questions and listen to people’s stories. Ask about their pain points, what solutions they’ve tried, and what they’d like to see in a product or service. Be genuinely interested in their needs and be open to their feedback, even if it’s not what you expected.
Where to Learn More about talking to customers
Two great books that dive into the importance of talking to customers and validating your idea are:
These books offer valuable advice on how to approach customer conversations and gather meaningful insights to improve your startup idea.
Don’t ask customers what they think of your idea
TODO
If you can find a few people that have the same pain point then you keep going
If you can find a few people that are interested in the pain point, you are looking to solve well then you need to keep going and go to the next step.
How many people? Well, that depends. I would recommend finding at least five people that ultimately say, “Yes this is a pain point I also have”.
3. Create a Landing Page
Now, the next step is going to be to find a way to continue to validate your idea by actually trying to acquire your first customers before you even build it.
That is right! We are going to build a landing page and then drive traffic to that landing page.
Not sure how to build a landing page? That is a bit beyond the scope of this post but I can create a post that covers that in detail, including amazing no-code ways to do so, if you let me know you are interested here.
That landing page should describe all the details of your product and then either allow them to get notified when you launch or it can be a button that is a “fake door”.
Fake Door Testing is when you put up a landing page that makes it look like your Product is actually live and that customers can try it at any moment by simply clicking “Try Now” or something similar.
Only when customers click on your “Try Now” button will they actually find out that it’s not yet launched.
This approach is usually more effective than using a “Get Notified When We Launch Button”.
However, either is appropriate to use to validate that people are interested enough to give you their email.
And even though an email is not as good a validation as an actual purchase it is a type of exchange.
Everything beyond this is (UNDER CONSTRUCTION)
Going beyond just getting an email
Now, some people will go the extra mile and even actually get sells of their product before it’s launched. If you can pull this off and it’s appropriate for your product this may be the way to go.
I have actually thought about creating a platform that allows people to easily sell their products before they actually launch.
It would allow you to charge customers for the first month of your subscription (or for the entire product) and then you could show them how many customers have already purchased and how many left until you commit to building.
If you don’t collect enough payments by a certain number of months (set by you when you started) then it will refund all of the customers.
If you would be interested in a product like this let me know by clicking here:
Getting traffic to your landing page
Now let’s talk about the hard part. Getting traffic to your page.
The way you approach this is going to differ depending on if you have a budget or not. Usually this means are you funded in some way or are you are bootstrapped.
First we will talk about what to do if you have the budget, then I will talk about what those with no budget can do.
If you have the budget
There are four main ways to acquire customers for most startups:
- SEO
- Ads
- Cold Outreach
- Social Media and Social Listening
I am not going to talk about Cold Outreach because I haven’t yet used it to validate a Startup Idea. At least not in the traditional way of doing cold outreach through emails or using a full on sales team.
Now let’s talk about Ads and SEO. Both can be amazing though quite complex and expensive to get started with so this is why you typically need a budget in order to go these routes.
Ads are great for quickly validating ideas
If you have the budget ads are definitely one of the best ways to quickly validate an idea.
However, ads are super complex to setup and that is why people pay big bucks to agencies or use services like Swift Ads created by my friend Brian Leung on Twitter.
If you have the money, and the help, ads are the way to go!
SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This is a broad term that generally means writing content for the purpose of ranking high on Google Search Results.
If you want me to write more about SEO and how to leverage it effectively for small startups let me know by clicking here.
Using SEO and content marketing to drive traffic is incredibly powerful.
I still have an affiliate marketing that brings in several hundred dollars every month even though I haven’t worked on it in years. And in its heyday it made a lot more. I actually should probably try to sell that thing.
SEO is a long term play
But the thing about SEO is that it is also a very long term play. You’re not going to start ranking for even low comp keywords overnight especially with a new domain. Believe me I have tried.
And SEO is NOT easy. Especially to scale. Larger startups have entire teams doing that. And then there is the whole aspect of link building which is an entire skill itself.
SEO can still be used to validate startups
However, I wanted to mention SEO because I have heard of people that will use it for idea validation. They find low comp keywords like maybe “rent out my home gym” and then they throw together a landing page with a “Fake Door” and they see how many people attempt to sign up.
It can take months but they have many of these experiments going on and so they just wait.
If you want to learn more about SEO you can follow a friend of mine on Twitter named Roberto Robles.
He has something like 100 cats. So if you are looking for a Cat he might be a good person to talk with about that as well.
I am probably exaggerating about the number of cats. 🤣
No budget? No problem! Social Media to the rescue
So, now what if you don’t have a huge budget? Or maybe you do and you are just wanting to explore other options?
Now if you are on Social Media and you already have an Audience then you can just ask your audience to get an idea validated.
Of course, most of us do not have massive audiences that we can leverage.
But you can still leverage social media to validate an idea even if you do not have a large audience…
By searching social media!
Searching Social Media
You can go to Twitter or Reddit and just search for keywords your customers might mention.
For this example I can go to Twitter and look for “home gym”.
Then I could find people that are talking about home gyms and comment on their tweets or even DM them to see if they are interested in trying my new Home Gym Sharing platform.
I could say something like, “Hey I am building a Home Gym Sharing platform! Would you like to sign up and make money on the side from renting out your home gym when you don’t need it?”
I could do the same thing on Reddit as well!
Letting Notifier do the searching for you
Now of course one huge problem with this approach is that every day you’re gonna have to go to Twitter and Reddit and do the searching. Also Reddit’s search functionality is not great. In fact many would say that it’s completely broken.
It’s actually one of the great mysteries in tech why Reddit has never realized or just never cared to improve their search functionality. It’s something I am going to cover some day in my LinkedIn posts on Missed Product Opportunities. So be sure to follow me there.
This is where Notifier comes in to save you time and do the Searching for you! We search all of Reddit, all of Twitter and a bunch of other interesting online communities. You can see the full list on our landing page.
If you know of an online community you want us to support feel free to let us know here.
Using Notifier you can input the keywords that you wanted to search for and notifier will do all the rest of the work notifying you via multiple methods whenever that keyword occurs.
We also have advanced filtering options to help you narrow down exactly what you’re looking for.
And if you happen to be technical Notifier is the only tool in the world that supports searching with regular expressions!
Now, we actually have quite a few bootstrapped startups using Notifier in this way to generate leads and we would love for you to try it out also!
Feel free to reach out via email or by using our Slack Channel if you ever need any help.
Bonus: Automating it further by hiring a virtual assistant
The last thing I want to talk about is what we ourselves do at Notifier and what we have seen some of our customers do!
The truth is that social listening is incredibly powerful but also sometimes it can be incredibly time-consuming.
For example, sometimes it’s hard or simply not possible to filter down to exactly what you are looking for. As an example think if you were Apple and you had signed up to use Notifier.
It is not easy to filter out mentions of “Hey I want an apple” from “Hey I want an apple [computer]”.
Grammatically they are the same thing. A human knows to look at the overall context. We are working on that contextual matching but its still in development.
So it can be helpful for a human to review your results and quickly get rid of the non-relevant ones.
Besides that though it can just take time to respond to all the potential comments, etc. Because of that we and other people have hired a Virtual Assistant and trained them to respond appropriately. You might be thinking, “I can’t afford to hire a virtual assistant!”
But honestly you cannot afford not to! Your job is to drive the business. You need to delegate out valuable tasks like this so you can focus on driving the business forward.
You might be surprised how affordable virtual assistants on platforms like Upwork are because of how much cheaper it is to live in other countries!
Important Note: do not make the mistake of immediately hiring a virtual assistant!
Make sure you know how Notifier and Social Listen itself works and develop your own approach to best leveraging it for whatever you’re trying to do. Once you have a real documented approach then you can outsource it and delegate it to an assistant.
Let me know if you would like more information and tips about hiring virtual assistants on Upwork. I’ve been thinking about writing an article but I need people to let me know that they are interested in it by clicking here.
Now get out there and start validating your ideas and getting customers
That’s it for now! Now it’s time for you to get out there and start validating ideas and finding your first customers.
Please keep me informed of your progress! We would love to feature you on the Notifier blog and talk more about what you’re working on!
If you would like to try out Notifier then you can do so by clicking below. But even if you don’t feel free to reach out and hit me up at any time for advice. If I do not know the answer I can usually point you in the right direction.
