How I got 150+ users with no product

How to validate a product that doesn’t exist!

It’s almost Easter, and I’m at my family’s house this weekend. What a good time to write an article? Today I will talk about how I collected emails from users interested in a product that in practice did not exist.

The Product

The product I’m talking about is AI Alfred, an artificial intelligence tool that summarizes any online content in 1 click. Today we are almost 700 users, and it has generated 3k of revenue in the last 15 days.

But I’m not here for that. Today I’m going to talk about how we started, and why it’s so important to understand people’s interests before we even develop a product.

Very often we get stuck developing a product for weeks, and maybe even months, without having the slightest idea whether or not that product will work.

It is also true that the validation phase of any idea is very often boring and slow (I can understand you, and I say this as not a patient person), but it is fundamental. There are various ways to validate an idea, but today I’m going to talk about the way I used to do it. And it’s simpler than you think.

What have we used for our validation?

Two things: a channel in which to promote the product (fake, because there was nothing); and a landing page.

I used Twitter as a promotional channel, and yep.so for generating a simple landing page.

The first landing page I made for AI Alfred is still active, and this is the link: https://yep.so/p/ai-alfred

As you can see from the landing, it was a very simple structure, where we were showing a first basic MVP (fake, since the product it was not working yet).

It also wasn’t as appealing as Landing in terms of product screenshots, and wording.