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When it comes to market selection, I often think back to how Ryan Petersen came up with the idea of Flexport. He put up landing pages and some ads, and only whe
by kirillzubovsky 6y ago
When it comes to market selection, I often think back to how Ryan Petersen came up with the idea of Flexport. He put up landing pages and some ads, and only when he saw interest from the biggest players did he go all in. It's a pretty darn good way to find out, even if it sounds too simple, or cheap, but if you listen to the rest of the interview, Ryan had semi-failed enough times beforehand to realize that simplicity was key. Maybe throw a bunch of landing pages up and see what works?
(original audio segment: https://smashnotes.com/p/y-combinator/e/92-ryan-petersen/s/how-did-flexport-get-its-first-customers https://smashnotes.com/p/y-combinator/e/92-ryan-petersen/s/h...)
- abi 6y agoThat's pretty cool! Didn't know that Flexport started out like this. Here's another example of using a landing page to validate demand, and one where the product ended up being a very successful company: https://sumo.com/stories/80-20-business-idea-validation https://sumo.com/stories/80-20-business-idea-validation I recently played around with the landing page method for an idea I had and ended up not getting much traction. That negative feedback was really useful in helping me decide whether to actually code up the app. Wrote about here, if anyone's interested: https://abiraja.com/the-landing-page-method/ https://abiraja.com/the-landing-page-method/
- system2 6y agoGood read. I think for anyone creating so many ideas and want to test, it is safer to try landing page method. 100 ideas, 3 really gets traffic, then those 3 really work.
- abi 6y agoYeah, I think the key point is that the landing page method is great for identifying smashing successes (high true positive rate, low false positive rate). But ideas that fail the landing page method might still be good, just need more investigation (high false negative rate).