So you are a developer, designer or entrepreneur and you want to start your new side hustle, endeavor that you think might change the world or make a world better place or make same side income. So how do you come up with the idea or how do you validate the idea. I will be breaking up the these in to two phases. First I will point out some of the resources and tricks that help you generate new ideas. Secondly I will point out how to validate your ideas.

Idea generation

“The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It’s to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.” - Paul Graham

Resources that help you generate new ideas.

Idea validation

  • Before putting your hands to the code, start by pinning down what are the key features that your product has and what problem does your product solve.
  • Make a simple landing page that gets your points across and add an email form at the bottom of the page for users to sign up if they would like to use the product in the future. Also make sure to add google analytics to your site to track the visitors.
  • Make a campaign that targets your audience - these days it’s really easy to pin point your customers. Just use Google Adwords, LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram. Make sure not to spend too much. The goal here is not to get the actual paying clients, it’s to see how many clients sign up. If the sign up rate is too small it might not be as a big of a problem for people as you thought it might be. Either you can change the target market and do another campaign or you simply go back to the idea phase.
  • You can get free landing pages here at gatsby. To modify the styles you should be familiar somewhat with react. You could also use stackbit that even deploys the app for your. It really can’t be more simple than that.
  • If you are here that means that you generated enough interest for you to go forward and actually start building the product. The emails you got are very important. Pin down 5 to 10 people who are really interested in what you are offering and who are willing to be you alpha testers.

Now comes the interesting part - building the product.