How do you validate demand for your side-project?

* Build the minimum needed features to solve the problem for your own use case

* Make it open source

* Give it away for free

It's not the golden rule that will work for everything. But that's what I did with Lunar, my app for controlling monitors (https://lunar.fyi) and it helped enormously with adoption and with seeing if a large enough user base could be created.

A lot of users offered to donate, others told me that I was stupid for not asking money for the app, others constantly asked for features on Github which helped me understand how the product could solve the problem better.

In the end, I prepared a large update with most of the features that were requested and made those features paid while keeping the old version free and open source.

99% of the users applauded this decision and were happy to pay (the other 1% sweared angrily through emails, but what can you do..)

Set yourself a discriminating target.

A friend’s kid asked me for some advice about his startup. It is a SAAS in the elder care space; he’d developed it for his grandmother and had a few friends using it as well.

He asked this same question (except it wasn’t a side project). I suggested, “If you can get 50 people whom you don’t already know to use this product for more than a month then you might have a winner.”

The three keys here are:

1 - more than a month meant they actually found it useful. For his SAAS it would imply they’d stick around after a starter period month.

2 - people he didn’t know: his friends and their parents might take extra effort to use it. He had to find people with actual need

3 - 50 is arbitrary but not terrible; a dozen or so doesn’t tell you a lot while 250 probably doesn’t tell you a lot more than 50 or 75

In the past six months he’s tweaked his product based on feedback from this effort and has gotten into the high 20s.

Sell one unit to someone. In fact, do it before you start coding. Coworkers, business contacts. "If I built X would you pay for it? Yes? Cool, what's a fair price?"

Get one of those first, then open your terminal. Aside from showing there is a non-zero market for your wares, it also proves that you are willing to do the hard part which is the selling, not the building.

If you won't do the hard part then you are wasting your time. So do the hard part once first.

Some things I've found helpful (I run a niche search engine and curation platform):

1) Find niche subreddits where people that are your target audience hang out, observe communities, help people out, participate in the discussion, if someone has a problem that your product can solve, then help them out in the comments and see what their feedback is

2) Learn a bit of SEO - you don't need to be an expert to fix some low-hanging fruits and get your product in front of people who might be using search engines to find a solution for their problem. Downside: SEO can take a few months to a year to kick-in, so if you have a very short time-window, it might not work immediately

3) Create a landing page and a sign-up list - see how many people sign up

4) Find bloggers and community members that write about your topic, cold email them telling them about your product. Be prepared for the response rate to be pretty low, but it can work.

5) LinkedIn - ok, ok I know I might get downvoted for this, but imho LinkedIn still has some of the best organic reach of any social platform, so you might as well use it to post about your product (esp. if it is a B2B one)

FYI - for consumer tech products, willingness to use something doesn't equate to willingness to pay for something, which you have to account for when doing research.

I think it depends on the audience. In my case, I built my side project to try and solve a real problem that my accountant had. It worked, and several other businesses — mostly accountancy firms but certainly not exclusively — have paid for premium subscriptions. Some businesses have been paying me every month for years.

I think my audience is the type that prefers it if you pick up the phone and have a conversation with them, or email them, or write them a letter. So that’s what I did. I had lots of conversations with lots of people. I tried to build relationships to make sales, and the validation part only came when the customer actually paid money.

I tried the build almost nothing and throw up a fake credit card form like some people suggest, but it didn’t work. I know it works for some people, but it didn’t work for me.

For a side project? I build it if I want to use it. There is a totally different goal for a business, but side projects are hobbies. They bring value to my own life regardless of what other people think of them. It is a great bonus if other people also get value of it and are willing to pay something, but there is nothing wrong with writing a project that simply helps me in my own life.

I listed the widget I made on Tindie and then promptly forgot about it for a few months. But when I got some initial purchase orders, I started paying attention again. When I got a repeat order from a customer, it had my complete attention. I called that customer, we talked about exactly what problem it was solving for them, and I learned a lot. However, it still took me another two to three years before I stopped everything else I was working on to focus on the widget full time. But now that widget has been my main focus (and source of income) for the past seven years.

Edit: One thing that helps is if your widget is a good-enough replacement or alternative for something that people are already buying for 10x the price of your widget. Even if your widget kinda sucks (it will! it does!), people will be so happy that they're saving 10x of their $$$ that they won't mind your widget's flaws... and they'll enthusiastically tell you which flaws matter and which ones don't, so you know how to improve it in the future.

tl;dr: 1) Pick a widget category where you can make a thing 10x cheaper than the competition. 2) Get a customer. 3) Talk to them. 4) Take notes.

I think the main thing is that you have to actually talk to the people you want to sell to to find out what their problem is and why it's still a problem despite their next best alternative. Then you need to talk to them about the potential solution you have in mind to make sure you're not off the reservation entirely.

But the real moment is getting a specific person to actually give you money, hopefully before you put in too much work on the experiment. Promises or "that sounds cool" won't do it, you have to prove it to yourself by getting a person to give you real money for your thing, that's the only way to really know.

I had a recent side project, a pdf generator of sorts that I made to solve my own problem.

I decided to try selling it, even though I was 100% confident that no one would buy it. During the first couple of days I’d also overpriced it, because I didn’t want anyone to buy it before I’d had the chance to fix a couple of bugs.

To my surprise (and frankly, shock) people were buying it. I was sure that requests for refunds would start rolling in immediately due to the aforementioned bugs, but they didn’t. I eventually lowered the price and even made it free, because the money was immaterial to me and I’d already learned my lesson from this project. (I also felt guilty for not setting up the infrastructure to ship updated versions to buyers, so I took solace in the fact they could get them for free on their own.)

I might go back to it, but the product is seasonal and doesn’t create recurring revenue so I’ll more likely be focusing on other things.

I’ve never had a project that hasn’t generated at least some excitement in the relevant community, so I might just have a knack for these things. Too bad I only just realized I could’ve been making some money from it!

I feel like validation is less of an end-state and more of a process of increasing probability.

Like you might start with one data point ("hey, it's really annoying when I try to do X" or there are a couple posts in online forums from people describing problem X).

Then you get more data (see if more people have that problem, talk to the users on forum posts about their specific needs, find out where potential users hang out and how many people might have this problem).

Then maybe you build something simple to address the needs and see if people are interested / use it / pay for it (landing page or minimum valuable product).

Then you get feedback from the initial users about what they're really needing and iterate lots of times to get it right while figuring out where and how to market/distribute.

Throughout this process there's an increasing sense of confidence that you're on the right track (or not).

But also sometimes you build something just because and it turns out that lots of people like it (Minecraft). But the risk of wasting a lot of time and effort is a lot higher without continuous feedback.

The single necessary and sufficient condition for a business, says MIT’s Bill Aulet, is a paying customer.

First you have to make an important distinction, one that seems oddly difficult for many here on HN - you have to decide if you are earnestly committing time to this project *to make money*. If that's the case, now your time has value and you have to actually figure out if an audience exists and furthermore if that audience (which may or may not exist) is actually willing to pay for your solution. I chose the word solution because solutions implicitly derive value, a new note-taking markup or photo sharing app does not.

The second step is to field your solution and see if people are happy with the problem you've solved. Marketing is also a concept far too often underestimated or overlooked on HN. For instance, I wrote some software based on complaints from a very specific diy agriculture subreddit. Once I reached a bare minimum MVP I posted it on reddit, people were excited because a cool tech thing solved a problem they had. They shared with their non-internet friends and orders / emails started steadily flowing in. Unfortunately, the time/revenue ratio wasn't good enough and I basically broke even on the project.

That said, think about the problem deeply before spending valuable time "validating" what might be a solution nobody actually needs.

Start with a problem and not with a solution. Specially a good problem to solve. How do you know if it’s a good problem to solve?

Im my experience using Buffet’s approach to investing works well. Invest in good companies at a fair price and not in fair companies at a good price.

That means that the problem will usually have a higher cost to solve (time, effort, money).

Now, this is my opinion. Take it with a grain of salt. In the end, a focused approach to problem finding tends to work best.

Read The Mom Test for the only repeatable, reliable process. It is a fairly simple approach and if you execute properly it will be absolutely brutal on your ego.

I’m doing a surfing class booking platform.

I felt a need for something like this as a surfing student: I was booking classes via messaging/phone.

A few years go by and I forget about it, but recently I meet the owners of two surfing schools who tell me about the need for a such a booking system.

Trying to launch soon.

Hope this counts as validation.

I wrote a handbook a little over a year ago about creating startups [0]. One of the most important points is ensuring that your product addresses a market gap. Demand cannot be created, it can only be awakened. In brief, one must: identify a market gap, contemplate a solution from the user's context and needs, create a prototype that demonstrates the core of the product (Minimum Viable Product), and do sales or pre-sales of that to complete the validation.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Rocketshipping-accelerated-thinking-S...

Marketing/sales has been the easiest part of the work to me, and I'm a "tech guy". You simply tell people about it and they'll throw money at you.

My first business was selling coffee. I put a coffee machine on a metal table, put some pallets around it. Some dude came and asked for an espresso. He said it was too small and tasted nasty. I told him I'd refund that and give him a latte, which was 8 times bigger than an "espresso". He refused and gave me money anyway. He was later a daily customer after the first latte though. More people came and we sold 100 cups on the first day. Did we do marketing? Yes, we told the people staring at us that we'd give them a full refund if they didn't like it. Nobody took the refund.

My first real startup was a recipe app with an ingredients store. People just went to the store and clicked "add to cart". I did not expect them to. We didn't have a dashboard for viewing orders (nor a cart, the purchase button just took their phone number and address). I hacked something that put together a cart on the dashboard, then I'd contact them on WhatsApp and give my bank account details (we didn't have a payment gateway either).

The hard part is often the product. If you have bad lattes, nobody's going to order another. If you don't have recipes for flaxseed flour, not that many people are going to order the flaxseed flour.

I'd say don't listen too hard to entrepreneurship gurus who tell you to "validate before writing a single line of code". Often the code is part of the validation. I tried to run ads for flaxseed flour and nobody bought it. There's a niche for it, and that niche was overadvertised by other sellers. Writing the code exposed us to a marketing flank we never knew existed, and the app was eventually acquired as a diet food marketing channel, because the CAC was lower than Facebook ads.

You can build something of value and give that for free. That's actually a little easier than trying to go the validation route. From there, you can use the feedback to pivot into something of higher value or is more monetizable (e.g. DLCs). Metallica didn't think they'd make money off music, so they started with t-shirts.

Fake door testing. Create a marketing page and see the reaction you get.

There's a simple way to ensure that you're making something that people want - just solve an existing problem instead of finding a new one.

Search for your problem on google. If the top results are blogspam with ads for monetization, that's a bad sign. Are there existing products in the niche and are they doing well? Is there a lot of search volume for related keywords? Do you have a better or unique understanding of the niche that others lack?

Do a short exercise about your provisional persona: needs, behaviors, goals, facts. Then ask yourself where you'd find that person and post a smoke test/fake door test landing page in those spaces (for example if your demographic is 50-somethings, women, disposable income, parents, etc. you may look at Facebook and find some groups to distribute your landing page).

Look for microtraction, and then experiment as much as possible.

I'm not sure what their rules are for a software project, but it kind of seems like this is what Kickstarter is far. If you meet your funding goal then you've validated the idea with people already putting $ on the table.

From the B2B side, demand is validated when multiple (>10) organizations are willing to schedule time (30 minutes) to watch your demo. That requires scheduling and team efforts. That’s when you know the pain is real.

Don't overcomplicate things. Ideally you or someone you know is willing to pay for said product. Then you find other people like you or someone you know who are also willing to pay.

Simple for me: how easy is it to find your first actual ( and paying) customers compared to building a website.

Fyi: yes, some experience building websites for others is required.

I’ve heard good things about this book: http://momtestbook.com/

Can someone recommend common places to list new side projects?

In my case small SAAS app for business folk.

Surely there’s spots on the web for this?

Just do it, ask for money and see what happens. We just did it and it worked, there was no previous research.

I don’t. Money is not a primary motivator for my side-projects so product-market fit is not a concern.

Build a tool that does early demand validation. There is a certifiable demand.

I mainly do 2 things to validate my project: 1. find relevant threads on reddit or other communities. If people are asking the same question again and again, it's a good signal.

2. find if any products exist to solve the problem. If there are a few of them, try to guesstimate the market size. Mostly likely, there is a market for that if the number is ok. If there are many existing players, there is no need to validate because obviously there are many competitors in the field.

Ask for payment. People will tell you it's a good idea and then balk at paying even a nominal amount.