I set out to experiment and fail fast with 10 business ideas in 2024.
When starting out, I was trying to decide which SaaS idea I should focus on:
→ Larger market?
→ VC or bootstrapped?
→ Selling to executives or middle management?
I was trying for weeks to decide which idea I should focus on.
One morning, I realized that the ideas themselves weren’t that important.
I’ve seen so many funded startups work on a single idea for two years only to have to pivot afterward. The pivot is painful and sad. Then the pivot isn't successful and they shut down.
And I really believe that if they could’ve tried 2,3,5 times more, they would have been successful. But they couldn't get enough reps in.
I wanted to avoid falling in love with ideas and instead judge them based on a pre-defined set of criteria.
But I couldn’t find any framework for researching product ideas and validating them.
So I set out to create one.
Unexpectedly, I found some answers in the VC world.
When I was speaking about this at a family dinner, someone told me to look into Team8.vc
Team8 creates SaaS businesses and doesn't just fund them. And their model of SaaS business validation immediately clicked.
With my partners, I adapted the Team8 VC model for a lean SaaS business.
We focused on ideation and creating a confidence test. How do we find ideas, and how do we know if an idea is any good?
We wanted to ensure our ideas go through a standardized filter to weed out the bad ones.
For example, Fiverr can be a great startup idea. But it’s not a lean SaaS, which is what we want to build.
So, we created the Lean and Mean SaaS Risk calculator to ask:
→ What type of SaaS business are we trying to create?
→ Who is our one target customer? How essential and urgent is the problem for them? Do they even care about what we’re building (Am I right Joe Martin)?
→ What is our solution to their problem? How complex or easy is it to develop? Can we be profitable?
The spreadsheet takes a stand and shows our opinion.
It may not be the best fit if you’re trying to build a VC-backed SaaS business.
But, if you’re trying to have confidence in a lean SaaS operation, it will work- and show you if you’re on the right track.
It works like a street light: You want to get green on as many rows as possible to know you can move forward.
For our first round, we started with 20 ideas. 5 scored the highest, and we are now proceeding with them to the market-fit test.
If you look at our spreadsheet before anything else, you will work on your best ideas. And you’re going to save years of your time.
See the spreadsheet here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...AhghW9965HjJcx_b-IokijZHdJuXX4igd0/edit#gid=0
When starting out, I was trying to decide which SaaS idea I should focus on:
→ Larger market?
→ VC or bootstrapped?
→ Selling to executives or middle management?
I was trying for weeks to decide which idea I should focus on.
One morning, I realized that the ideas themselves weren’t that important.
I’ve seen so many funded startups work on a single idea for two years only to have to pivot afterward. The pivot is painful and sad. Then the pivot isn't successful and they shut down.
And I really believe that if they could’ve tried 2,3,5 times more, they would have been successful. But they couldn't get enough reps in.
I wanted to avoid falling in love with ideas and instead judge them based on a pre-defined set of criteria.
But I couldn’t find any framework for researching product ideas and validating them.
So I set out to create one.
Unexpectedly, I found some answers in the VC world.
When I was speaking about this at a family dinner, someone told me to look into Team8.vc
Team8 creates SaaS businesses and doesn't just fund them. And their model of SaaS business validation immediately clicked.
With my partners, I adapted the Team8 VC model for a lean SaaS business.
We focused on ideation and creating a confidence test. How do we find ideas, and how do we know if an idea is any good?
We wanted to ensure our ideas go through a standardized filter to weed out the bad ones.
For example, Fiverr can be a great startup idea. But it’s not a lean SaaS, which is what we want to build.
So, we created the Lean and Mean SaaS Risk calculator to ask:
→ What type of SaaS business are we trying to create?
→ Who is our one target customer? How essential and urgent is the problem for them? Do they even care about what we’re building (Am I right Joe Martin)?
→ What is our solution to their problem? How complex or easy is it to develop? Can we be profitable?
The spreadsheet takes a stand and shows our opinion.
It may not be the best fit if you’re trying to build a VC-backed SaaS business.
But, if you’re trying to have confidence in a lean SaaS operation, it will work- and show you if you’re on the right track.
It works like a street light: You want to get green on as many rows as possible to know you can move forward.
For our first round, we started with 20 ideas. 5 scored the highest, and we are now proceeding with them to the market-fit test.
If you look at our spreadsheet before anything else, you will work on your best ideas. And you’re going to save years of your time.
See the spreadsheet here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...AhghW9965HjJcx_b-IokijZHdJuXX4igd0/edit#gid=0
Let me know if you have any feedback.