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We are talking about validating ideas.
I have a massive hunch that this service solves a problem.
But we need evidence before we put loads of effort in
So we are in validation phase....
The story of a man who got hung up on a video
The man is me. I got hung up on getting a video for the landing page, because, well, everyone else has one.
That is not as good reason.
I commissioned my friend Imran to do an explainer video with just me and started explaining Sustainability Entrepreneur on camera.
‘This is too much about my ego’ I felt. This video is all about me, but what I want is something about what I’m building. I rethought the video and asked my friend Mark Shayler to help me with this.
Mark and I had a day in his back garden doing a video with Imran again. This time it felt too contrived. We were straying too far away from the simplicity of the service.
Then i thought why am I doing a video? The landing page explains what we do. That should be enough to get the all important email address of the interested party.
‘I need a video explainer for the landing page to tell people what it’s like’, I had thought.
I let myself get distracted with bells and whistles when what I should’ve done is follow the advice of Tristan Watson, a friend who suggested that I set up a Slack group and see what sort of response I get. That is the easiest and cheapest way to start getting feedback.
That might have given me my evidence sooner. Instead, I went down a laborious route of , building a landing page, a blog and developing video.
The video held up the validation launch by 6-8 weeks.
Video is important for sure but did i need it for the validation phase where we are keeping costs down?
This was all before the 500 sign-ups target!!
What's the message?
Looking back, perhaps I should have made the landing page or slack group and got the evidence there for the go-ahead, because now I’ve spent months trying to get a video explainer, when I could have launched the service and developed things as we went along. Did I need a video to validate my idea? Perhaps not, there was probably a cheaper and easier way.
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