Launching IdeaVerify to Streamline Idea Validation — My #BuildInPublic Journey — episode 1

Introduction

I'm finally going to start my #buildinpublic journey! On the journey you will see how I came across a problem, how I chose to solve it and finally how to launch! Each week I'll post what I've worked on and share what I built, so others can learn along the way. Let's get started!

The Genesis:

My coding adventure began as an attempt to bring my brother's vision for a college-centric social network to life. Despite months of development and launching with an initial user base, the lack of market validation led to its stagnation. This pivotal experience highlighted the crucial step we missed—validating the idea before fully committing to its development.

The Awakening:

Fast forward to the present, I've recognized a recurring pattern in my approach to projects—a cycle of enthusiasm followed by a realization of misalignment with market needs. This realization sparked the concept of 'IdeaVerify', a meta-solution born from the lessons learned throughout my journey.

Below is the manual process I did to test out this idea:

1. Came up with a solution to a problem.

2. I built a simple landing page describing the problem and the solution.

3. I described the features, services, and prices with CTA's like Signup Now, or Subscribe now etc. All of the Purchase Now CTA's would not actually allow the user to purchase the SaaS but would show the user to sign up for a waitlist.

4. I then took that static page and deployed it on places for free like Netlify or Render

5. The only thing I had to pay for to make it look legit was a Domain address, and to do that I would go to Namecheap to purchase a cheap domain.

6. Once created I published it to channels like Reddit, Twitter, Quora, Linkedin, Facebook and showed it to users of whom I thought would benefit.

7. I then analyzed what type of interest I got and from there I made a decision if it's worth it to build.

This is how I came up with Ideaverify! I actually went through the entire manual process above and got a lot of interest by just posting on one or two subreddits on Reddit. I got signups, and messages saying that it was real interesting and that people were wondering when it would be ready.

This is how Ideaverify was born. I wanted to automate this entire process of validating or verifying an idea. It would automate all of the above, all at the click of a button but also provide analytics and a "go or no go" decision.

In this #buildinpublic series I will be using my boilerplate.rcmisk.com SaaS starter kit built in Django and React with all the common SaaS features: transactional emails w/ Postmark, Stripe for payments/subscriptions, Google Analytics, dynamic landing page and copy creation, blog, user login/registration flows, Material UI for styling and deployment to Render.

I'm going to break up this project into different parts, and milestones and show the code, learnings and development along the way!

Milestone 1

1. Allow user to input what their SaaS is all about and then generate a landing page based off the copy the user provided and different template styles

2. Automatically create a google analytics app pointing to the url for tracking

3. User clicks "Create" and behind the scenes deploy the static landing page pointing to a unique URL associated with ideaverify.com subdomain. i.e. my-new-idea.ideaverify.com

4. Allow user to update copy, images, and style once it's deployed

Milestone 2

1. Allow user to pick niche subreddits on Reddit and post to from within the ideaverify dashboard.

2. Show top subreddits/posts on Reddit to post to based off key words that their SaaS is associated with.

Milestone 3

1. Allow user to point it to their custom domain This I believe will be a good MVP and stopping place to launch Ideaverify!

Follow me here:

https://rcmisk.com

https://twitter.com/rcmisk

https://indiehackers.com/rcmisk

https://dev.to/rcmisk

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