What's your process for finding out if an idea has potential?
Hey folks, I read 'Make' by Peter Levels years ago and found his process quite interesting:
Spending a week listing your personal problems,
Rank them, then look for solutions for the top three.
If nothing meets your needs, build it.
The beauty of this is that simply by doing the exercise, you end up meeting some of your needs by discovering something out there.
What I’m missing now is how to identify a market signal after your MVP, or even before, to know if it’s worth continuing to develop.
Do you have any thoughts or book recommendations?
Replies
I usually follow my gut first if the idea gives me that spark, I know it's worth checking. But then I challenge it hard. I ask myself: If this was someone else's idea, would I be excited or skeptical?
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@hazel_mathew Mmmm... I like that question. Funny thing is, during one of my research sessions for an idea, I found similar projects that were discontinued, and I felt so sad about that. I guess it was a good signal for the excitement check. The other part, why they shut down, is another piece that I'm adding to my process, talking to people who built what you are building (or thinking of)
Creating a dummy landing page (honestly doesn't even need copy on it, but copy and a CTA are helpful), then spend some money running text-based, headline-only paid ads to the site. Test like 30 different headlines.
What headlines outperform?
What are click throughs?
Do people click the CTA on the website?
MASSIVELY telling exercise before spending any more time on an idea.
People shy away from this b/c it requires spending a little money, but in the long run it's WAY cheaper to test and kill ideas this way.
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@emikes919 What was your budget?
@diegodottac $15 x the number of headlines you're testing. I'm currently testing 32, so my total budget for a 2 week test was $480.
Turn off all Meta AI placements. Use fully manual control. Set automatic rules for each ad:
shut off each ad daily when it reaches $3 spend per day
shut off each ad permanently when it reaches $15 lifetime spend
shut off each ad permanently when it reaches 1,000 impressions
This forces Meta to serve your ads evenly so you can get clean data about how people respond. Otherwise they will heavily favor outperforming ads and your data will be meaningless
@diegodottac here's an image of the rules:
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@emikes919 Have you tried Meta Forms instead of a landing page? I've tried the approach you mentioned before, and in the end, optimizing campaigns for a landing page CTA is still too unreliable to be a good indicator of final intent (signup, trial or purchase). Meta is really good at bringing the users you want. I'm asking because my goal is to test purchase intent and I don't want to create a smoke purchase test. I've been considering using Meta Forms for a while to create some friction, though. It's still not the perfect metric, but it's an affordable way to increase commitment and better qualify final intent. What do you think?