Some of you read my post about the SasS - or better - Performance As A Service.
There were some people who didn't grasp the concept or who just didn't have the knowledge to know why a fast site matters. "Cloudflare does this", "My site loads in 3 seconds and that's fast enough'.
There were also people who were certain that I'm a Russian hacker only out to steal the data in the traffic of their site ?
Ofcourse it's easy to counter such comments, but it did made me wonder whether I should validate the idea before diving head first into it.
So I did.
How I validated my SaaS idea before diving in head-first
1: Does it actually solve an important issue?
The first step was to see whether there really was a need for site to be fast. This one was actually easy to find backing information for - everything from studies done by Google and Amazon shows that the time a site takes to load is crucial for customer spend, retention, and bounce rate.
Validated - speed matters and it matters a lot.
2: Does the market already have an alternative?
CloudFlare was often pointed out as "having done it already". But Cloudflare is a global CDN and while it does provide caching, you need to be extremely good within IT to know how to set it up - something virtually no small business owner is capable of.
Validated - Cloudflare's $52B market cap shows there's money in such a service all in all - but I carved a niche where they don't have a focus on.
3: Do ecommerce shop owners also know that speed matters? Are they willing to even pay for it?
Without the potential customer knowing that the problem your SaaS solves is actually an important one - selling to them will be a nightmare. People do not buy what they do not understand.
Aaaand... validated! ?
I decided to make a few cold calls to some people I know operate relatively small webshops (but large enough that it is a serious business).
The call with all of them went extremely smooth, but here is the way I worded things: I did not tell them about my product in the start. Rather, I asked them - how important is speed and performance for your webshop?
That way, I was able to frame the conversation entirely around the benefits THEY told me of a fast shop. I didn't have to convince them or educate them on anything - they sold themselves.
They paid me - not for any ownership - they paid solely for it to be built in the first place
Now, my current situation is that I am in dire need of money. I was screwed by ex-partners a month ago and that left me with barely €5 in my bank.
So I told them this - I cannot build this without getting paid in advance, as I do not have the cashflow.
2 of them said they could not afford the price I suggested but would want a monthly price if it gets done.
The rest - they all agreed to paying me - upfront - €3k +/- a few hundreds. And they know they'll also pay a monthly fee to use it as well ?
My take-away
My take-away on this was pretty straight forward. In my current situation, I don't have the luxury to spend months building something before selling it, I really don't.
But to have taken the rather unconventional path of getting people to pay for something that's not even built - for the sole reason that it does get built - validated that the idea is something worthwhile. But also, it gave me a large amount of cash in quickly to solve my cashflow issues.
[link] [comments]
