New MVP tech stack: Tweet + Stripe payment link
jasonleow • 14 Feb 2023 •
A bit of a trending indie hacker thing: Validating product ideas with just a tweet, and a Stripe payment link to collect presales.
Before, the barest of MVPs would be a landing page with some copy and an email sign-up form, ala Dropbox.
Now, you don’t even need a domain and website! Just tweet and buy button! Love how we’re pushing it to test product ideas with the most minimum of effort.
I find this to be poetic. Such economy of effort, and so simple an approach to show an idea. No bells and whistles, no snazzy “change the world” copy, no invasive click funnel tracking, no rainbow gradient call-to-action text or buttons.
Just 280 characters. And a link to buy.
The 280 characters is key. If you can’t communicate what’s valuable to your customers in a tweet, maybe it doesn’t really have legs.
The Stripe payment link is key too. Waitlist sign-ups are notoriously unreliable metrics to validate market demand. It’s such low commitment to just give your email. But open up your wallet to pay right there right now, with no real product made yet? A lot of upfront faith, a huge commitment and a great signal for demand.
And with tweets having only a 24-48h life cycle, it’s clear at the end if your idea have potential.
Tweet + buy = pure poetry.
Comments
Yeah, like every approach to MVPs and market validation, it’s works well in some ways, but can certainly be done poorly in many ways. Felt the way Pat Walls did it was pretty instructive. Seeing opportunity after helping 1 person with it. A Loom video showing clearly what it is. Having his audience size helps (but also feel that depending on your product/market, your following can be a lot smaller than typically assumed to be required).
I think it’s lazy on purpose isn’t it? Not worth investing too much time into it before knowing if there’s an opportunity… but of course, the laziness shouldn’t be at the expense of clearly showing the value.
I have complicated opinions on this.
On the one hand, sure, it’s a form of pseudo market validation. On the other, though, it’s kind of lazy. Tons of people I’ve seen do this barely give you any idea about what the eventual product is going to look like, often because they don’t know themselves. It’s also fairly dependent on you already having a large audience. The reasons I pre-launch my classes is for market validation, but it’s also because I already have a curriculum up for you to see exactly what’s going to be taught. I already have skin in the game.
It’s also not great for the seller because you really can’t verify that a market is not validated. Maybe 20 more people would have bought your thing if you had already shown what that thing is going to look like.