How to Test Demand For Your Product Before You Build It
It’s all too common for founders to skip straight to the fun part - building - before they know there is demand for their product.
But building takes a long time and the months you spend building a product nobody wants are months you wasted where you could have been learning.
Back around 2011, I was taking that approach: coming up with new ideas, talking to a friend or colleague about them, and skipping straight to the design and build.
After enough times launching failed products, I figured out very a simple tactic: launch the product before you build it.
I came up with a simple landing page for Proposify (then called PitchPerfect) with a series of value propositions, fake screenshots of the product, and an email sign-up form.
I set up a small Adwords campaign of just a thousand dollars and sent people searching for “proposal software” which had a very low search volume, but enough to capture about 100 email addresses for my waitlist.
With these emails, I was able to reach out and tell them about what I was considering building, ask for feedback, and get some test users when we launched.
Taking this approach allows you to test out three things:
Who does this product resonate with?
What about the value proposition resonates?
Will they sign up and/or purchase it?
Let’s break down exactly how to do this:
Write a value proposition
Whatever product you’re thinking of building should solve a big problem for a specific market.
After talking with people within the market you should have a good idea of what they struggle with and what your SaaS aims to solve.
Turn that into a value proposition. I like to use a simple framework:
“We help [market] solve [problem] by [what your product does].”
A value proposition for Shopify might look something like this:
“We help creators sell their products online by easily getting an e-commerce store up and running without hiring a developer.”
Not perfect, but you get the idea.
Create a landing page
If you’re not a web designer, there are a number of tools that make launching a landing page pretty easy. I use Squarespace for my website and it’s very easy to create landing pages with that tool. Unbounce is another popular tool.
The landing page should have a big headline, a small paragraph describing what the product does, an image, and an email capture form.
Promote the page
Send traffic to this landing page through paid advertising. This will probably give you the best indication of whether or not this is a real problem that people are actively looking to solve.
Sign up for a Google Ads account and run a search campaign to your landing page targeting people searching for keywords related to what you do.
For best results, focus on intent-based keywords - you’re selling software so you should target related keywords.
For example, if I’m sending traffic to Proposify, people searching for “proposal software” have the intent to find and buy software.
Someone searching for “proposal template” may want software, but more likely they just want a downloadable Word document or something like that and aren’t the best gauge of real demand.
Analyze the demand
Once you have some traffic going to your page you should know pretty quickly if anyone is signing up for your product.
If nobody is signing up, then there’s a good indication that something is off.
Are you getting impressions but no clicks? Maybe the copy doesn’t address their search keywords. Take a look at your ad and try some different versions.
Are you getting clicks but no signups? Maybe the landing page is too different from the ad.
You can also install a small survey widget on your page that uses “exit intent” to pop up when it looks like someone is leaving the page. You can ask them what they were looking for and gather some qualitative data on what’s missing.
After you’ve experimented a few times with the ad, landing page, and keywords to ensure that they are well targetted at the audience and the problem you solve, and you still aren’t getting any signups, it probably means there is no demand for what you’re selling or you’re selling to the wrong audience.
Congratulations! You just saved yourself months or years of building a product nobody wants. You did it without writing a line of code or paying a developer. Now that you know, you can move on to another product idea or another market opportunity.
However, if you’re getting some signups, now you can leverage those emails to learn more.
Leverate your list
A big list of signups is a very good indication that the market is searching for a solution to a problem, so I’d want to leverage that interest to learn even more.
Ask for a call to learn more
Include a Calendly link so they can easily book a 30-minute call, and if you’re finding that’s hard, add an incentive, like free consulting, a 3-month trial of the product when it launches, or if needed, a paid incentive like a $20 gift card.
Ask open-ended questions on these calls to learn more about what problem they were trying to solve, what triggered them to look for a solution, how they solve the problem today, and what their dream solution might look like.
Send value-add content every week
Begin creating content that helps your target audience, and email it to them every week. It could be a blog post, a newsletter like this, or a YouTube video. This will help you begin to grow your audience and build the foundation of an inbound marketing engine - something that will really help you down the road when you have a real product off the ground.
Make them your test users
If you find there’s even a small handful of people who are engaged and interested in your product, send them early mockups or have them test prototypes and give you feedback.
Test pricing
This group will likely be the first people to buy your product. You can begin to test the waters of pricing and figure out what people are willing to pay to have the problem solved. I posted the four pricing questions to ask here.
Let me know how your test goes!