Mis-validation

Validation is a waste of time. If I validated Pallyy on Twitter, probably would of never started it. Instead, launch and use that time to find your first customers. Once you have a few, validate with them. – @Timb03

Validation is a waste of time… if there are established competitors selling similar products. – @theandreboso

These tweets from Tim and Andrea got me thinking hard about my Sheet2Bio project.

Maybe my failed launch to validate it on Twitter back in June 2022 was “a waste of time”, or simply gave the wrong signal. Because the idea of a link-in-bio SaaS is mostly validated by the market, with established competitors like Linktree, Koji, Bio.Link.

It’s not a new market nor a novel product.

Sheet2Bio is similar but with just an added spin of using Google Sheets for managing content. That’s it.

And when you try to validate a product in an established product category with a general audience like on Twitter, you’re far more likely to get crickets because “Why bother trying this new kid on the block when I can go with something more established?” Or you get responses like “So-and-so company is already doing it. How would you even compete?”

Like Tim said, if you tried to validate such type of ideas solely off feedback from Twitter, you would have never tried.

This reminds me of a tweet from @yongfook –

If the idea is proven and you just haven’t carved your slice of the pie yet, don’t quit. If you’re grinding on some unique idea that hasn’t found a market after 6-12 months, park it and move on.

All this talk is making me have a change of heart for Sheet2Bio. My intuition told me I should quit Sheet2Bio a year ago. But now my intuition is asking me to reconsider, after one year more of experience.

Maybe “follow your intuition” is bad advice when you’re a newbie, because your spider sense for the market and product-market-fit is still underdeveloped.
Maybe I mis-validated it because I was using the wrong tool/approach (Twitter audience) to validate.
Maybe it’s a project that can’t be validated the indie hacker way.
Maybe it can’t be rushed.
Maybe I just need to build it out, and let the back links, SEO, reviews, word of mouth etc to slowly carve out my slice of that pie. Like how Tim did it with Pallyy in the social media scheduler space.

Maybe I had quit too soon with Sheet2Bio…