How do I know people will pay before I build it?

Everyone will say they'll try your app, everyone will join a wait list, everyone will do something for free. They'll all say nice things.

What you want to see is whether people are going to put their time, money and effort into this thing. You'll know if people will pay for it not by giving it away for free, but by trying to charge for it.

Before I ever made my social media app, I first made a newsletter. I asked, are people willing to pay for that? What's the smallest version of what you're creating that you can put out there to get evidence of that?

Grab a piece of paper and make a list of the possible problems you saw that are common to your customers. You're going to do two columns. Column number one is the problem. Column number two is how much money it's costing them, how painful this is.

You have an insane advantage most people don't have. You have access to people with relationships and an inside view of their problems. It's easy to develop. It's hard to develop the right thing.

Speak with your customers and pre-validate the problems. Make them an impossible offer, where they pay based on how much money they actually made. It's a no brainer.

Ideally, if you decide to go for this business, you want to be in a position where you can quit your old job and you already have new clients lined up. The best way to line those up is to reach out to your network.

Maybe a very simple home page. One page. Send it and say: I'm considering taking all my experience and building my own thing. Is this something you'd be interested in? Consider it already a sales pitch. But you're just testing the waters.

I believe if you have one or two people who say yes, we're with you, I don't think anything holds you back.

Before you go down the route of building everything out, maybe you can test how much people are willing to pay.

Maybe you send it to your existing community. Maybe you also run some ads to get a sense of a colder audience. Let's say you run ads for like $200, $300. See how many people buy at $10, how many at $30.

You can just build a landing page and show your offer at the price. See how many people hit add to cart or buy now. Hitting buy now means they have the intent to purchase at that price.

No one's gonna tell you if the product is good or not. You need to try selling it. You will get a lot of rejections. But on those rejections you learn, you change your proposition.

A CEO I worked with sold his product to 50 companies before building it. He had a presentation, an app design and nothing else. He's crazy, I would never do that, because it takes sales skill.

If they paid money, or at least there's a letter of intent, they are probably ready to pay. If you had 20 meetings and everyone says no, you know you cannot sell it. So you need to change something.

You need to validate. Ask about the pain point and what they would pay. I think one of the biggest, most challenging things about this is to do it as unbiased as possible, so we don't get the happy feet.

Salespeople tend to be very optimistically biased sometimes. They have happy ears and happy feet. What we're really trying to do is, in an unbiased way, validate our assumptions or hypothesis.

You probably need to find about 8 to 10 to have a big enough sample size. You need to be open to creating an environment that allows them to be honest with you, even if they know you.

From my experience, you need some sort of balance. Just building and seeing what happens is quite often inaccurate. A small amount of planning or interviewing people would quite often give you insights much quicker than building.

I run a software agency and I've seen people burn through hundreds of thousands of euros where they could do better research.

Say you offer me an app for 20 bucks that saves me the whole week. Logically I should agree. But I don't know you. I don't know the quality of this AI stuff. A book on running interviews teaches you to filter out this fluff and concentrate on the signal.

The question you have to answer for yourself is: are there other companies that also have this problem? If the answer is yes, you may have a business. If the answer is no, you will be stuck building for your own company that you're an employee of.

For you to figure out if this is a real business, you should try to talk to 50 to 100 companies.

If you go to your CEO and you convince your CEO to let you do the test, you have no confirmation that this is a business.

It's really common for folks to feel like they have to build something before they get customers. That's not always true. There's a fine line. A large healthcare organization doesn't want to be your guinea pig, and I'm not saying pitch the thing and then go build it. A lot of times it's not a thing you have to build to solve the pain.

It's the painkiller versus the vitamin. Start with customer conversations and figure out what headache they have. Five will give you some really good signals, but I bet after three you'll be itching to build something. I would stop after three and see what you're learning.

A client of mine asked people, would you pay for this? They said, oh yeah, of course. They built it. Now no one is paying.

Out of your wait list, identify your champions: people who will not only pay, but also help you build it. Usually it's a bunch of 7 or 8, maximum 10 people. They would happily jump into a 30-minute call with you, and what you want is to calibrate how interested people really are.

I wouldn't really incentivize those calls, because what you want is honest conversation. You'll be surprised how much people are willing to help, especially if you're building something that resonates with them.

Speaking generally, the only research you're allowed to do when you're starting a startup is conversations with customers, when they're working with what you've created.

You have to build the MVP. When I say MVP, I don't mean with all the bells and whistles, I just mean the simplest possible. If you're working full time on it, with AI, just as an estimate, I don't think you should spend more than a few weeks to build that MVP.

Once people can interact with it, you could be doing user feedback, and that's your research. You show them the MVP and say, what's your willingness to pay for something like this?