09/21/2022
How to validate your SaaS feature ideas?
If you have built and maintain software before, then you know the cost associated with building things nobody uses.
A few costs here:
π©πΏβπ» Development, this is a significant cost as engineers and UX talent are not cheap.
βοΈ Maintenance, engineers have to maintain this code forever until it is removed.
π
Sunset, to remove and sunset features, this takes effort in engineering and migration.
βοΈHealth, the mental health of the Engineers, Product Managers and UX suffers greatly when the feature theyβve worked so hard on is not used.
πΈ Opportunity cost, instead of building things users want, someone else will do it.
So it is very critical to validate ideas before building!
In our experience in the industry, we have come across many techniques but none are as powerful as whats called a Fake Door Experiment.
This is placing a fake ad, landing page or UI component along the customer acquisition funnel that represents the idea. We will measure the conversion or take rate and collect some feedback.
Some questions we need to ask β:
1. How many people actually clicked the ad?
2. How many people clicked the Sign Up button on the landing page?
3. How many people clicked the fake feature?
4. Why are they clicking it?
We go into more details in our blog about how we are running these experiments with LinkedIn.
What are some ways you are validating ideas?
How we prioritize which integration to build next by fake door testing the market using LinkedIn Ads.