How to test product demand before you have a product
In the first 3 steps, we found problems, thought through propensity to pay, and have a rough business calculator. Wouldn’t it be nice to know if someone wants your thing before you go to the trouble of building it? It’s a great way to avoid spending a ton of time and resources on something people don’t want… but how?
There are ways to do this, and I will cover 2 of them, each in a different post. They are:
- Go ask customers what they want (an upcoming post)
- Set up a “painted front door” (this post)
What’s a “painted front door”?
A ‘painted front door’ is like creating the facade of a product—much like painting a front door before the house is built. It’s a landing page with details about a product that doesn’t exist yet. In addition, it also has a call to action, like signing up for a waitlist. The purpose of this is to have something that represents your future product (landing page) and some way for potential customers to tell you they are interested (waitlist sign up).
I’ve heard about this concept forever, and it makes sense. It sounds so easy. But I had no idea how to do it until recently. Here are the things you will need:
Landing page
A few landing page software options I’ve used:
There are many more options, this is just my short list. I would recommend Carrd for totally non-technical people and Webflow if you can invest a little time learning. This is what an incredibly simple landing page might look like:
Database
You’ll need to put your waitlist sign ups somewhere - like in a database. Not only does this keep you organized, you can go back to it later to do things like email people on the waitlist if you do launch or see if they are up for some early user research. There are plenty of options, but I’ve used Airtable. Here’s what a waitlist looks like in Airtable… kinda like a spreadsheet.
Connect your landing page to your database with an API (!)
It’s not as hard as it sounds. You’re basically just connecting your waitlist sign up, where people put in their contact info, to your database. The API is just that connection. I just followed this and this Youtube video, which uses Carrd, Airtable, and Hopscotch. They walk you through the details, and it’s easy enough I could do it!
Now what?
Once you have a landing page set up and published, you can start to get a sense of whether or not people have an interest in the product you describe. You can use this method for any type of business (landscaping company? phone app? e-commerce? sure, kind of anything).
But how do they find you? Google ads are a good place to start. This is another situation where it sounds so easy (“just set up a google ad”), and I found it incredibly confusing. So in an upcoming post, I’ll walk you through the steps of how to set up a google ad to understand who is searching the internet for things related to your product, whether or not those people are interested in your product, and finally if they are interested enough to sign up for your waitlist.