My honest 1 week validation attempt for my first side project
It is been long time and first time posting something like this.
I'm trying to build a small SaaS product — a tool that audits landing pages and tells you what to fix. The idea came from noticing how much bad advice is out there ("just A/B test everything") and how little of it is actually actionable for a solo founder with no team and no budget.
I have no existing audience. No Twitter following worth mentioning. No email list. No previous product. Just an idea and some time.
So I'm doing validation the old fashioned way like talking to people before building anything serious.
Here's what week 1 actually looked like, unfiltered:
What I did: Built a basic landing page with a waitlist form. Took about a day. Added a "would you pay $19/month" question to the form because I'd read that collecting feature requests without willingness-to-pay data is basically useless. Good tip, stealing it from someone on this sub.
Posted in a couple of communities. Reached out to about 15 founders I follow whose work I respect, not to pitch — literally just "hey, I'm trying to understand a problem, would you mind 10 minutes?" About 6 replied. Had real conversations. Learned more in those 6 calls than in a week of reading.
What's still unclear: Whether people will actually pay or just say they will. The form responses are encouraging but I've been warned enough times about the gap between "great idea!" and a credit card number that I'm not celebrating yet.
What's next: Keep talking to people. Try to get to 30 proper responses before I write a single line of backend code.
If anyone here has gone through early validation for a solo product , I am interested to know what was the thing that finally gave you enough confidence to start building properly? I keep going back and forth on what the actual signal should be.