# Validate Your SaaS Idea FAST (Step-by-Step SaaS Validation Process)๐Ÿ’กโœ… Channel: Rob Walling Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31U9X_XD63c Duration: 12 min Language: English Words: 2700 Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/31U9X_XD63c --- [0:00] in this video I'm going to walk through a step-by-step process to validate your SAS idea in less than 30 days in fact I'm going to walk through the two most common ways to validate a SAS idea and if you stick around until the end I'll tell you a third approach that I think is even better I'm Rob Walling I've started six companies I've written three books on building startups and I've invested in more than 100 SAS companies so I want to start off by talking about the difference between idea evaluation and idea of validation so evaluation is where you take an idea and you run it [0:31] through criteria and I actually have a framework called the 5 PM framework for evaluating SAS ideas and if you want to hear about evaluating an idea and you want to hear about this 5 PM framework head to episode 628 of the sister podcast to this YouTube channel it's called startups for the rest of us where I walk through this framework of How to Think Through evaluating an idea and this is really helpful if you have 10 ideas 20 ideas you can't validate all of them right validation is where you start taking steps to find out if people are interested if you can gather the traffic and if this is going to be a reasonable [1:03] idea to pursue validation is a Continuum you're never going to get to 100 with a ton of validation a bunch of people on an early access email list and 20 30 40 people who have committed to pay for it you're still at what maybe 60 70 that this is going to work you're just never gonna get to 100 validated and in my career I validated a lot of things so I validated a SAS app called drip before we wrote a line of code I validated my first book start small stay small with a landing page I validated our conference microcomp that you know this YouTube channel is named after the company [1:39] microcomp I validated my SAS accelerator called tinyseed before we did anything we put up a landing page because we wanted to see if there was interest from Founders and interest from investors and lastly I validated an online community that started about a decade ago for early stage startup Founders by putting up again a landing page finding out if people were interested in this video I'm going to focus on two approaches to validation but I did want to talk about kind of the gamut of approaches that we see in the independent SAS space so microcomp runs a state of independent SAS survey where we survey hundreds of [2:12] bootstrap and mostly bootstrap really non-venture track SAS Founders and we put together a report every year and in the 2022 report we asked folks how did you validate your idea and from most popular to least popular the options were 33 percent built a prototype or an MVP 20 asked Their audience 18 combined got verbal commitments or pre-sales seven percent copy to competitor seven percent put up a landing page now what I'm going to do in this video I'm going to talk about the verbal commitments or pre-sales and I'm going to talk about landing pages and which you use depends on the space you're going into whether [2:49] it's high touch or low touch if you look at this list of approaches to validating really the Prototype or MVP in my opinion should come after you've set up an ending page or you've done your verbal commitments or pre-sales I feel like just building a prototype or MVP is probably a recipe for really not validating because you're putting in work before you go have these conversations in addition asking your audience which is also a popular one I think can be pretty dangerous there's this thing I call the curse of the audience and it's where your audience really likes you and if you say would you like a new tool that does XYZ they [3:24] often will tell you what you want to hear because a they like you they're trying to support you they're not trying to make you feel bad and B an audience no matter how big you're gonna Plateau I've seen it firsthand I've seen it secondhand a lot of folks with small to medium size audiences launch that SAS and they get up to a thousand 5K maybe 10K a month and that's it and then they Plateau so today I'm not going to assume that you have an audience and the other one I'm not going to cover is copying a competitor I think that's interesting validation I actually don't think that's [3:52] a terrible way to go as long as you have some type of differentiation but we're not going to cover that in this video as I said we're going to cover landing pages is for low touch funnels and I'm also going to cover having conversations and getting either verbal commitments or pre-sales so with that let's dive into validation via landing page so you want to validate via a landing page when a it's really a low touch or no touch funnel if you're not sure what those terms mean we have a companion video on the best SAS funnels to use and you can search this Channel or just look in the [4:21] description of this video and we'll link to it but essentially what you're trying to validate here when you have a low or no touch funnel is can I drive enough traffic to make this make sense that's kind of your first risk the other risk is can I build something that this traffic will want to buy but realistically then you have to go build it because let me give you an example if you're building something that's going to be ten dollars a month twenty dollars a month going out and building that and trying to have conversations with individual people I question if that's a great use of time I actually think [4:48] there's a bigger risk and can I just Market this thing can I get people to a site and in the end if you do get a thousand or ten thousand people a month coming to some site a landing page or a full-blown blog if you get folks coming to that looking for something the odds are reasonable that you may be able to spin that into something that these folks actually want and are willing to pay for and the idea with building a landing page is to really build an email launch list because just having people coming to a site is fine but getting them on a launch list getting them to [5:15] opt in is really the measure that you're looking for if you're sending 5 000 people a month via these traffic channels I'm about to mention and no one's signing up for your email list you have a problem the typical approach to getting traffic to that landing page is to talk about it a lot to talk about your idea to go on social media you can ask for advice or you can tell people what you're building you can talk about it in entrepreneurial groups like microcomp connect the SAS community that is connected to this YouTube channel or Community like Indie hackers or even like show Han which is Hacker News you [5:47] can go to Beta list and add your idea there you can go to Reddit you can do podcaster YouTube tours q a sites like quora and stack exchange I've seen folks build pretty amazing launch lists or even an actual product you know do marketing on those sites or you can even use pay-per-click I did this when we were validating drip I drove traffic from Facebook ads and Google AdWords to our landing page to see if people were interested in a new type of email service provider and the idea behind this list is a to gauge are people interested and B to start having conversations with folks on that list [6:22] you can guide your product Direction you can get early Revenue when you launch and really it's a mechanism to have this tightly knit audience even if you already have an audience whether it's on social media or something else getting people to opt in to want to hear about the that particular idea or who at least are acting like they're interested in that particular idea can have a lot of value and so those are the ways that I would send traffic to the landing page and the question is you know how do you validate an idea by doing this and I said it earlier but if no one's signing [6:51] up for that email list it's probably not a great idea if you're getting 10 of people five percent of people who hit your your landing page to sign up for it that's interesting you know it depends on the type of volume you're sending I had a landing page at one point where I got 30 opt-in like that the traffic was so tightly connected to the message it was such a good fit that 30 of people who visited opted in that's a pretty high number if you're having more cold traffic sending Facebook ads or whatever you're probably gonna get in that five percent 10 range and consider it a [7:19] success now this doesn't fully validate the idea you're not at 100 but at least you have a signal you have one more signal than you had in your evaluation that 5 PM evaluation framework and from there I'd start reaching out to people on the list what might you be willing to pay for it what exactly do you want me to build and from there it becomes conversations and once you have some initial commitments and your idea is roughly validated it may be time for you to build a prototype or an MVP if you're not a technical founder or you're looking for an experienced developer to help you build that mvp you should check [7:47] out this video sponsor lemon.io cut down on hiring Time by working with vetted developers at competitive rates get 15 off your first four weeks working with their Engineers by going to lemon.io slash microcomp that's lemon.io slash microphone so now let's switch it up and talk about conversational validation this again is also called customer development it's called getting pre-purchases or just verbal commitments this is not something that you're going to drive traffic to you know a website later on and people are going to convert automatically even if it's not Enterprise maybe it's a one call close you do a demo and you you know you get folks to sign up this is a really good [8:27] approach to validating ideas that are have more of a medium or a high touch funnel and I've seen folks do this in two ways you can do cold or you can do it warm and to hear the story of a Founder who made 70 cold calls to find and validate their SAS idea check out episode 589 of startups for the rest of us and you'll hear how the founders of senior Place validated their startup idea it's a great story but it involved making a bunch of cold calls and saying I have this idea would you buy it and what he found out was people weren't interested in the idea he was thinking [8:58] about building they were are interested in a slightly different idea and so before they wrote new code they had already pivoted into this other idea and they've had pretty amazing success since then so that's cold validation let's talk about warm validation this is where you look at your network or at your audience and I know I talked earlier about asking your audience can be dangerous but realistically for asking them in aggregate I think there's more danger there if you're having individual conversations with people it can be interesting like you can learn a lot from them and so the idea is like look for advantages when you choose ideas if [9:28] you have a network or an audience launching into that space you have a unique advantage that other people don't have now I like to say if you're launching SAS build a network not an audience so if I didn't have either I would start by trying to build a network in this space if I already had one or the other it's an unfair advantage and you can use it because you can go to your network which is what I did when I validated drip and I emailed a bunch of Founders that I knew speakers at microcomp folks we'd hosted over the years and I asked them would you be [9:53] interested in a tool like this or if you have an audience you can obviously start talking about it and either Drive folks to a landing page or invite people to connect with you directly and then have those one-on-one conversations and these conversations are not a sales pitch in fact in my calls when I've validated ideas I would lead with you know I'm a developer not a sales person I have this idea and I'm curious if you'd be willing to pay fifty dollars like is this worth fifty dollars a month to you and then I would describe the value prop and kind of how it would work and when I [10:22] validated drip I had 17 phone calls and I wanted to get to 10 yeses that my goal was 10. now Jason Cohen from WP engine you can look them up he's an amazing entrepreneur he validated WP engine I believe he got 40 yeses before he was going to set out to build it for me I wanted 10 yeses and at that point I told my developer start building this idea if you want to hear the full story of how I validated drip and even see the content of the emails I was sending out to my warm Network check out the YouTube video on this channel called how to validate [10:55] your idea and launch to 7K in recurring Revenue in addition if you want to go deeper on this there's a book called The Mom test that talks about how to ask questions during this phase in a way that doesn't lead them you're not pushing them you're not trying to sell them on this you really are trying to find out would they pay for this you want the honest answer would they pay for this if you built it in a minute I'm going to tell you about the third approach that I think is an even better option if you've been enjoying this video it would be amazing if you could [11:21] hit the like button and subscribe to this channel we're putting out videos like this every week tactical deep dives into validating building launching and growing your SAS company so this third option I want to talk about is actually what I did with drip and I did both of the above I had conversations early on to find out if people were interested in paying for it then once they were the developers started working on it and I built a landing page and then I went and did all the marketing approaches that I talked about above and I wanted to build that pre-launch list you know I didn't [11:52] just want 10 people interested in the end we had I believe 3 400 people on an email launch list that were interested in our product and it made our launch day pretty incredible thanks so much for joining me today hope you enjoyed as I walked through how to validate your SAS idea in less than 30 days I'll see you in the next video [Music] --- About this transcript Read from YouTube's own caption track and laid out by ViewRank AI (https://viewrankai.com). 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