My journey validating product ideas in 2019
And some free tools that helped in this process
By reading about validating product ideas and starting small businesses I got excited to learn more by doing it. I left my day job and here I share a summary of this journey and the tools I’ve used in this process.
Why I did it?
I’m especially interested in learning by doing and find fulfilling ways to work instead of the traditional 9-to-5 job.
What I was doing before?
I’m a UX Designer that recently got my first job at a startup in Brazil. The company did not have a UX Designer opportunity opened at that time, but they found a case study I published about them and offered me an opportunity — read the whole story here.
My contract there was for only 3 months, a trial for both of us. Near the end of this period, they said they would like to hire me full-time. I was amazed by it. At the same, I got myself thinking of all the possibilities I wanted to experiment with before committing to a full-time job.
It was a privilege to have some savings, which enabled my husband and me to consider focusing on side projects for a short period. I ended up declining that offer and went on this new learning journey.
Calculating the risks
I knew it could be risky to leave the first job opportunity I had in the UX Design field but I thought it was worth trying. In the worst-case scenario, I would strengthen my UX Design skills and go back to a day job, so I put the lenses of experimentation and lean in.
Two months before I quit my job, my husband, that was also working in a startup, almost had burnout and left his job with no plans.
So it was the two of us willing to work for ourselves and open to trying different alternatives for living.
We knew it was challenging to create a profitable business. Savoia in his book “The Right it” has one chapter dedicated to the law of market failure.
I believe The Law of Failure is extremely important. If you accept this law as true, or even mostly true, and that neither you nor your it are exempt from the law, your mindset should change from: “Let’s go for it! Let’s just build it, and go for broke!” to a more cautious “Let’s try it. Let’s pretotype it!” — Alberto Savoia
To give us clarity about this process we've set a few points before doing:
- Set a safe period to do it without running out of money;
- Validate our product ideas in the simplest and cheapest way;
- Acknowledge the worst-case scenario: go back to work full-time;
- Try to build something profitable enough to pay our bills, not thinking about scaling it;
- Try to build something that gives value to other people and is aligned with our values: simplicity, tranquility, flexibility, autonomy, and constant learning.
So here we were: both at home ready to start the validation period!
First, let’s give us a break
It had been a while since we didn’t take a full break in nature so we thought it was a good moment to travel. We booked a cozy cheap house in the middle of nowhere in Brazil.
There, away from other chores and time to rest and reflect, we could read books, talk about various subjects, think of hypotheses to solve problems/create products and brainstorming to generate possible solutions.
We walked in nature, enjoyed the view of the house, and experienced a different place.
There was also the challenging part: dealing with many bugs, sleeping in a very hot wheater and the worries about the idea of spending our savings in this period.
Nothing went exactly as planned so being adaptable, trying to accept the things we couldn’t change, and looking at this trip as an opportunity to improve ourselves is an important mindset to keep throughout this journey.
Ready to validate the ideas!
Back home we already had an idea each and we’re excited to start!
I started researching, benchmarking, defining the value proposition, identifying the possible early adopters, designing the page and launching it.
My husband was in a similar process and also launched his product.
We love to have a schedule and explicit limits, but since we were not making money, we started to work more to compensate for the hours. We felt time anxiety and it started getting unproductive.
A month had passed, we paid the bills with our savings and realized that to make those projects profitable we’d have to invest more time and maybe some money.
My first project was a failure from the point of profit: zero sales. We invested around $5 in ads and there was no return.
The research phase was really challenging. I created a business account on Instagram to contact the early adopters and potential stakeholders, but people weren't replying my messages.
My hypothesis was that with a personal profile people would answer me. As I don’t have social media I couldn’t rely on any existent followers so I created a personal profile to reach these people (early adopters and the potential stakeholders). With no friends in my personal or business profile, it was really difficult to build trust and get people to talk to me and I learned a few things that get more people to talk to me during the research phase:
- Approach people using a personal profile and sharing my thoughts about this project — instead of starting with a company profile with no followers;
- Telling people how my project could bring value to them and then asking if they would like to answer some of my questions;
- Sending the main questions I wanted to answer as a message instead of in a link for a Google Forms — I did it with the early adopters and I got 56% more replies than when I sent a link with a survey;
- Telling people how much time they would invest in the survey and how much value it could bring to the project.
It felt great when I got the support of some artists for the project, but I would need more time and money to actually validate the project. As we were worried about our budget and our time I decided to pause the project.
My husband had an insight into another project and we thought it was an idea worth pursuing so we both started working together.
After working on it for a week we launched our second project: vagasux.tech.
It’s a website focused only on UX job opportunities.
To our surprise, people started subscribing and through the survey, we’ve sent in the first email, we discovered that people shared the website on UX communities via Whatsapp and Slack, which brought organic traffic.
We put an option on the website allowing companies to pay to have their job ad featured on the website. One company paid in the first month and another company paid in the second month. We were glad to see that the project paid for itself.
But then, another month came with more bills and more worries.
At this point, it was easy to get caught up on what we should be doing, like going back to a full-time job and saving money. At the same time, my husband decided to try a different approach and explore the consultant world. I started to build my portfolio and was ready to apply for remote opportunities and freelancing.
He soon got a job as a consultant and we felt a great relief that money would come.
Three months had passed from the beginning of this journey until the time I’m publishing this article. We are still trying to validate the last project and my husband continues to work as a consultant.
I'm working on the second project and looking for challenges that would allow me to work aligned with my values.
Conclusion
Building our own company, and working as a consultant or freelancer isn’t easy. There are a lot of unknowns besides the fear of failure.
From the beginning, we reminded ourselves that just keeping the status quo intact wasn’t an option. And, if the journey did not allow us to have projects that are aligned with our values and couldn’t pay our bills, as a last resort, we could go back to work full-time inside an office, knowing that we’ve learned a lot from this.
The book “The Right It” by Alberto Savoia was an open eye to validate our ideas most simply and cheaply, so this journey wouldn’t be something that would lead us to debt.
“Dealing with failure by underestimating it will, more often than not, lead to painful, costly and slow failure.” Alberto Savoia.
Our minimalist lifestyle gave us the self-confidence to try as we knew our spending would be under control and that we don’t need much to satisfy ourselves. We also recognize our privilege to have savings and other opportunities as a plan B, as technology is a fast-growing sector.
As a UX Designer, I'm glad I've tried and excited to work on other areas such as business, marketing strategies, and visual design with all the constraints of free tools and a low budget in this discovery phase.
It's being a great journey to learn how to get comfortable with being uncomfortable, adaptative, and self-motivated. I’m happy we have done this far.
Thank you for reading! 👏
👇 Here are some free tools I’ve used in this process:
To build the websites
To automate workflows
To create forms and embed in the website
To send the newsletter
To design faster
- Create a fast graphic design
www.canva.com - Free vector illustrations
icons8.com
https://www.vecteezy.com
glazestock.com - Color Palette Generator
https://colors.muz.li/
To help with marketing
- To analyze competitor’s websites history
https://archive.org/ - Generate keyword ideas for content marketing strategy
https://neilpatel.com/br/ubersuggest/ - Instagram engagement calculator
https://triberr.com/instagram-engagement-calculator - To inspire the creating of marketing headlines
http://nealrs.github.io/25Headlines/ - Keyword planner for marketing content
https://ads.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner/
