Validating an idea

The story of how I validated the idea of talking about solopreneurship

A few days ago I conducted an experiment and made $2000 selling …a product that does not exist yet.

Here's the full story.

I'm living the indie tiny online business life for more than a decade and it's a topic that deeply interests me. I've always had the idea of creating a resource for people that want to start their first steps in online business as solopreneurs.

I create courses to teach Web Development, so this is a completely different niche to me, and I've always pushed back this idea because I should focus on the thing that's working, right?

But working on new things is also fun to me, a breath of fresh air. So I started this small bet: what if I can find enough people to start a small cohort, and start from there?

So I started collecting some emails…

…by adding a link to the footer of my blog. It worked, as people started signing up. I got to 100 people and I thought the idea had legs.

But you know, I don't want to work months on a course and then nobody buys it. What if they aren't that interested in it? So I thought, if I can convince some people to buy it before it's even created, that's a win.

It's a sign there's a need, and the thing has legs.

So I started pitching.

After people signed up to the email, they received a link to preorder the course that will take place in June, 4 months from now.

The promise was that if I didn’t reach 20 people, I would refund the money back.

After a few hours, the first sale came in. Then a few hours more and a second sale. That was great. I started tweeting about this, and people started signing up through Twitter.

Got to about 10 people.

Finally, I emailed the 100 people that had entered their email when the pre-sale wasn't open and got another 10.

The goal was to reach 20 people…

…and that goal was reached.

Those 20 people will be part of batch zero of this cohort course.

The course does not exist yet.

What I've got are years and years of notes that I need to organize and extract my core ideas from.

Now I can start working on the course knowing that those 20 people already paid and are now waiting for my course to deliver.

Signups are now closed, and this will be the first “beta batch”, batch zero.

Once batch zero is delivered I'll think about the next step, which will be the first official big batch in October.

But… one thing at a time.

So this is how I validated my idea

In very little time I went from “I have this fun idea in my mind but I don’t know if people would be interested in hearing about that from me” to “ok let’s do it!".

I think this is the first time I tried this and it worked.

I did something similar a few years back with book ideas.

I had books I had not written yet and I put them on presale on Gumroad. That didn’t really work.

That’s not just me

While running this “experiment” I noticed a few other people did the same thing.

It’s probably like when you buy a new car, or think about buying a specific car, and suddenly you see tons of that particular kind of car on the streets. I can’t remember if this thing has a name.

To be honest I felt like I was part of a small “movement” or something.

I sold my first pre-sale on Feb 7th.

Pat Walls, an Internet friend of mine I’ve followed for years from the “indie makers” community, on Feb 8 posts on Twitter about how much money he does thanks to email marketing.

“Internet friend” is a term I just conied to label people I know from the Internet, never met in real life, maybe they don’t know I consider them friends, but hey. Think “person you follow” and think what they do is interesting.

Eventually Pieter Levels, another successful indie maker I consider an Internet friend, probably DMs him and talks about this email thing and Pat sends Pieter a loom with a live demo of the email marketing setup, Pieter says “you should make a course”, Pat quickly creates a Stripe payment link for a $99 presale, Pieter tweets it, and 💥 boom 💥 250 preorders amounting to $25,000 in revenue for a course on email marketing.

That’s not bad, isn’t it?

The same day, Marc Köhlbrugge tweets about a product idea, does the same thing with a Stripe payment link, but it doesn’t work and shuts down the idea, and keeps reiterating on other things.

That’s the opposite example. You try something, it does not resonate, and you shut it down. I’ve done this countless times.

It’s not always this easy

I’m not saying this is the “perfect approach”. It assumes you already have an audience, an audience interested in what you want to do, it assumes the algorithms that day play in your favor and people actually see what you write, it assumes people already trust you and you have credibility and a track record, etc.

But it’s a pretty cool example of going from idea to doing it, without first spending months and months on something people might not want.

It can also be problematic in the opposite way: the idea is good, but in that moment people didn’t “get it”, or it simply didn’t reach the right people, the people that need it.

This substack is born out of this

Following the email collection I had about 180 people on my list about Solopreneurship (you included?) and I decided to start this Substack because I think it’s a cool platform and writing this blog post that turns into an email is …new? Refreshing? I find it nice.

Feels like a publication, more than an email. More than a blog post.

The experiment continues.

Stay tuned.