I talked to 9 people about my idea, here's what I learned

I spent most of my time interviewing people for my new SaaS last week.

I talked to 9 people in total. I scheduled 15 calls, 3 dropped out / no-shows, and 3 left to interview.

Today I'm talking about what I learned.

But before I tell you how insightful it was, let me first tell you what I'm doing.

I'm building a SaaS in public, posting progress every day. I'm also adding lessons from my mistakes and learning from current events. If you're interested, you can binge-read all the past updates in my newsletter.

My main goal for these interviews was to confirm my hypothesis

"People are willing to pay for a product that makes it easy to create high-converting landing pages."

I told all the folks I interviewed at the end of the call what was my hypothesis, and I wanted to know their take on it.

The immediate biggest lesson I learned is that I was trying to get an answer to an obvious problem.

Of course, people will pay for something that makes them more money. Who wouldn't?

The question that I got asked the most was "How are you going to deliver on this promise?" and I didn't have a clear answer to that.

The big question isn't whether will they pay for a high-converting page. The big question is how am I going to deliver a high-converting page? How do I ensure is high-converting?

For a moment I thought I had to scrap everything to find a job.

Thankfully the questions I asked were quite good and gave me the insight I needed even if my hypothesis was not right.

Here's the list of questions I asked:

1. "Please tell me, how you do create a landing page today?"

2. "How long does it take for a landing page to be created?"

3. "What is the hardest thing about creating a landing page?"

5. "How often do you need to create a new landing page?"

6. "Why is it important for you to create landing pages?"

7. "How much does it cost to create one or more landing pages right now?"

8. "What if I could make the problem disappear? How much would you pay for this?"

I'll cover the first 3 and the insight I got from those questions and will leave the rest for another day.

"Please tell me, how you do create a landing page today?"

It was wild the number of different ways of building landing pages that were mentioned. Out of 9 people I got 7 different ways to go about this problem and every single one of them was slightly different.

There were 2 most common ways to do it:

- People who run a company prefer the outsourced route. Use a designer to create the template, and get a copywriter to write the copy. Then they would either build the page if they were technical or use page builder / WordPress / 3rd party service if they were non-technical.

- People who needed landing pages for their side-project / product they were launching, built most of it from scratch. Pre-made Tailwind CSS templates were the most popular. (mentioned in 6 out of 9 interviews)

"How long does it take for a landing page to be created?"

This was by far the most insightful question.

The answer ranges from days to weeks. Out of 9 people, the average was 1.5 weeks to have a landing page created and in production serving traffic.

This makes sense as if more than one person is involved there is an extra coordination layer that has to happen. Talk to a designer, talk to a copywriter, and the time adds up.

Even when one person was building. It wasn't as straightforward as a code for a couple of hours.

"What is the hardest thing about creating a landing page?"

There was ONE universal answer to this. Content.

Both structure and the copy of the landing page. Essentially what to put on the landing page.

The structure was where most people had problems with, followed by the actual text.

Notable mentions were assets: images, video, etc. High-quality imagery and videos are hard.

Every single person mentioned that the content was the hardest thing.

This was perfectly in line with my experience and I had further that I wasn't alone in experiencing this.

Next steps

As I mentioned I started building. Even if the hypothesis was not the right one, 2 findings gave me enough confidence to start building.

On average it takes 1.5 weeks to get a page done.

If I can make a product that makes it incredibly fast to build landing pages that would be a massive advantage. People value speed above most things. Ask Uber and the empire they built because they make it fast to go from A to B without using your car.

And then back to my original insight.

Is not hard to build a page but is hard to know what to put where. If I can solve this problem by telling people what goes in a specific section and why, I'll have a winner.

Won't be as good as professionally designed. Won't be as good as having the copy written by a copywriter. But it can be a good first step. And there is another business opportunity here:

I could send leads to designers and copywriters, they'll get more clients. Our customers will have high-converting pages.

If we all make money, we're all happy.

The heroes

I cannot thank all the people I've interviewed enough for their help.

Out of 9, 3 were ok with me posting about them, 5 preferred to stay anonymous and 1 is in stealth mode. Oh my!

My heroes:

Richard Holmes - Owner @ Ampersand Studio. Give him a follow on LinkedIn and check out Ampersand Studio

MysteriousShadow - developer of Grammarsen. Check out the product out, is brilliant! (We only chatted on Reddit so I won't link a profile as I haven't cleared it out with him)

Jenny Prochoryceva - Founder of Potenic and business strategist. Give her a follow on LinkedIn and check out Potenic

I might post the raw notes as post on my newsletter, let me know if you're interested in this!

Time to get building now!

Progress update

- I've done the initial round of user interviews and got enough info to start building

- My hypothesis was too generic and obvious. I need to re-think this part as I keep doing interviews

- I have a vertical slice of the MVP working: create a page, add a bunch of content, and view some simple analytics for it.

- I'll record a video and post it somewhere for all of you to see

Celebrations

Everybody panic! Growth has stalled!

- On the newsletter I had no new subscribers but I still have 22 legends there.

- Slow growth on the LinkedIn newsletter too. The are 128 subscribers at the time of writing. +1 from yesterday.

Whoever you are, thank you so much!

If you made it this far, please subscribe to the newsletter so we can keep the celebration going!

I cannot thank you all enough for your help and support, you're all legends!