Crowdform - Share your Idea

An idea won’t take off if you don’t tell anyone. We live in an age where it’s never been easier to become an entrepreneur, but the competition for attention has increased proportionally. As Steve Jobs puts it, ideas are worth nothing unless executed.

Soft-launch your project to a restricted audience as soon as possible, and don’t wait to have a product to start marketing. Ryan Hoover started Product Hunt as a newsletter where he would email everyone with news of the best latest products. All he did was collecting emails from 30 carefully selected influencers, and in two weeks he had 200 early users: 

“What assumptions do you have about your idea? What must be true for the product to succeed? How do you identify your audience? […] Test your assumptions, learn and iterate.”

Start pitching with a website and collect emails. Create content - blog posts, videos, podcasts, newsletters, etc. - to clarify your assumptions, explain your thought process, and attract early users.

The best way to validate an idea remains cash: are people willing to pay for what you want to offer? Send a payment link and obtain pre-orders. Pieter Levels from NomadList raised $100k in pre-orders before even writing his book.

Jason Fried from Basecamp proposes that everything is marketing: from Day 0, you have to start talking with people about what you want to do and how you’re getting there.

Don’t forget: as long as you’re still figuring out a sustainable business model, you have to keep doing things that don’t scale. A startup is a series of chemistry experiments where you attempt to create a strong market reaction called traction by making it interact with a product idea.

A tiny bit of traction - paying customers, enthusiastic domain experts, growing email list, etc. - is a sign you can move on to the next phase: the development of a Minimum Viable Product to learn more about your users’ needs.