Should you validate your SaaS? How to properly do it - a step by step guide

Validating your SaaS is arguably the most important step of your SaaS’s journey yet most people don’t do it and some think they did it (when they didn’t) and some actually don’t need to do it.

Getting this wrong could waste you weeks or even months of your time and can cost you a lot of money, let alone the opportunity cost.

In this article I’ll go everything when it comes to validating your SaaS Product.

Who doesn’t need validation?

Who needs validation?

How to validate?

“Who doesn’t need validation?”

If your idea is in a very saturated niche and you have a lot of competitors you may not need to validate you idea assuming you’re product delivers more or less the same end result. However if you’re planning on doing things very differently to your competitors you may need to Validate the approach you’re taking.

If the end result is more or less the same, In my experience a ton of validating isn’t necessary but it all depends on your product. If you think you’re product is doing things more efficiently to deliver the same end result you might not need validation. However if you’re going to drastically change the workflow in a very different direction you probably should validate this approach.

Who should Validate their Idea?

If you idea is unique or have less than 5 competitors, you probably need to validate. It’s really that simple, The odds of having a unique idea that hasn’t already been tested is low and there is probably a reason why it’s unique (likely because many has tried and failed in the past). Let’s say you have a truly unique idea, then you definitely need to validate it, no questions asked.

How to Properly validate your Idea?

In a nutshell here a few ways to validate your idea:

(not necessarily in any order, although the first 2 are the best)

1. Landing Page + Waitlist

2. Talking to the Target Audience

3. MVP

4. Ads

5. Sell before you Build

1. Landing Page + Waitlist

This is probably the most simple and and best way to Validate your SaaS. Go to one a page website builder such as Carrd.co and set up quick Landing page and integrate it with beehiiv or you could use an all in one solution such as fastwaitlist.com.

Once you have something set up to capture emails, you should start promoting your waitlist on social media. The most important thing here is to only promote to your Ideal Target Audience because you do not want random people signing up to your waitlist, Only people who have strong interest in your product.

You could do posts talking about what you are building, talking about problems in the current market and how you’re building a tool to solve this or by commenting on people’s posts on a problem that you are going to solve with your tool. There are so many ways to create content to promote your tool.

Tip: Create Relevant posts to your industry and at the end of each post explain what you’re building and a link to the landing page with the waitlist.

2. Talking to the Target Audience

Talk to your target audience, this could be by messaging them or in comment sections. Try to understand their pain points and what they are missing, talk about the product you are building and how it solves their problems. See what they think, this is where you get the feedback from a user’s Point of View. If they seem interested (ONLY IF) you send them a link to the waitlist.

Tip: I’ve built a tool that identifies your target audience’s pain points and lacking features in the market. It also give you a detailed analysis of your SaaS idea with everything you need to know. Check it out Profiolio.com

Also one other thing I like to do and is a very strong indication for validation is by Stealing your Competitors Users. 

This is the ultimate form of Validation, getting a person to switch from a competitor to your product is truly the a strong sign of validation.

How to do this ?

First Find your competitors users online, you could go on there X profile and go through their followers or you can see the people who engage with their posts on social media.

DM them and do the same as I told you to do earlier, propose your product and get them to sign up to the waitlist if they are interested

3. Build a QUICK MVP

Alternatively you could build a quick MVP and start promoting, I don’t recommend this approach a lot because you still need to do some sort of validation even before building a quick MVP and you should definitely not spend anything over 2 weeks building an unvalidated product. Ideally a week. But the problem with this is you can’t build a product that is truly helpful with great UI in under a week. I only Recommend this if it’s a small tool that solves a small problem.

4. Ads

I probably wouldn’t recommend taking this route either unless you have VC Funding. If you are taking this route, I recommend you Build a really Nice Website which showcases and describes your product perfectly (If you are going to spend on ads you should probably get a copywriter to do the copy for your landing page). If you have under a 100$ ad budget a day forget about this it’s not worth it, you can getter better results via organic content.

5. Sell before you Build

To do this Create a Paid Waitlist that gives access to to X Subscription for X period. Ideally you should give them a discounted price and if not launched it must be refunded. If you’re taking this approach you should truly build trust with your potential customer via messages and send them the link if they are interested. You can find your Customers by doing the same things I mentioned earlier.