Market Validation Strategy: Stop Building in the Dark—Validate Your Idea First

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season of Building Better Foundations. We're Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor podcast. We are going to have, once again, we're going to jump into an interview today. But first, I introduce all of us. Myself, Rob Broadhead. I'm a founder of Develop-a-Nor, also the founder of RB Consulting, where we help you assess technology and build a roadmap for success. In the world of good things and bad things, good thing is, it's one of those things, it's like, I hate always having two sides of the same coin, but it is this week as we're recording it, it is Thanksgiving week. Enjoy our holiday specials that you probably are hearing in between these things, which is awesome. I get, theoretically, I get a couple days off, get a four day weekend. The bad side is it's theoretically, I'm probably going to end up like, I'm just like, you know, all out to get to Thanksgiving day. And then probably we'll end up spending some of Friday and into the weekend making up for taking a day off on Thursday. But the guy that never takes a day off can introduce himself. Michael, go right ahead. Hey everyone, my name is Michael Molloch. I'm one of the founders of Develop-a-Nor. I'm also the founder of Envision QA, where we help businesses build reliable software through custom development and expert testing. If you have software you need customized or you're just struggling with your current software stack, give us a shout at EnvisionQA.com. Good thing, bad thing. Good thing, again, holidays are coming in, I get to spend some time with family, get to eat some turkey. Bad thing is we've got some bad weather coming in right now. I had some severe winds yesterday and yes, I will probably be working most of this holiday. And our guest today is Samir El Kamouni. And he is with, well, I'll let him introduce himself and who he's with and give us a little bit of your background. Well, I appreciate you guys for having me. I these days just call myself a serial entrepreneur, I suppose, kind of doing a couple of different things. And everything I'm obsessed with these days is wealth creation and preservation. So for individuals, for creators, for brands, you name it, I've got some interesting solutions for everybody out there. But yeah, lengthy background in marketing and sales and SaaS and lots of interesting things. Now I'm heavy in crypto and Web3 and a bunch of fun stuff. Regardless, I'm excited to be here. This week's been great so far. F1 was here last weekend. I'm in Vegas. So that was super fun. Great, great, great time. And I've been having some friends, been invited to some friends giving stuff, going to have some friends giving stuff. Probably the only bad thing is I don't really eat that much meat. So all my friends that are going to come over for friends giving are not going to have any turkey unless they bring it themselves. Well, you can get a lot of potatoes and such, I guess, whatever to meet that. It's good to hear somebody that enjoys the F1 there in Las Vegas. I was there two weeks ago and all I got, all I heard was complaints from the drivers about how it messed up all of the traffic and all the patterns and things like that. Every Uber driver was like, ah, I can't wait till this goes. And he says it's going to take another three months to tear it down. It was fascinating driving around in the middle of, I guess, on the F1 track, as it were, as we were going around there. So definitely good times there. Super fun. I'm going to dive right in with one actually wasn't even on my radar as something to talk about when we first stepped into this, but serial entrepreneur. I love it. I sort of feel like I am one. I think there's more than a few people out in the audience that are that way where you're just constantly like, you've got another product, you've got another company idea, you've got another service. How do you, in your experience, how do you, I guess there's two things is how do you distinguish between if you've got more than one going on at a time? And if not, like, how do you, how do you find like a stopping point in stepping into the next one? How do you transition from one enterprise into the next one? Great question. Really great question. I appreciate that question too, because I, I feel like I see too often gurus, let's call them gurus kind of on opposite ends of the spectrum, sort of one, let's build as many passive opportunities as we can. And if you don't have 10 passive income streams, what are you doing? And then on the other hand, the guy, you know, the other ones are, we're just like, if you just doubled down on the one thing and didn't get distracted by the five other things, then you'd probably be 10 X further along than you are. And somehow I think I try to subscribe to both, but I think it's really, really, really important to stay singularly focused on whatever you are really good at and bringing that to market or to the next phase or to whatever it looks like for you. And then from there, either hand it off, build systems, do something that allows that to either continue to grow, have other team members take care of it, become passive, whatever it is. And so for me, I definitely sort of take a little bit of the, you know, sort of crawl, walk, run approach at first, just, okay, dip my toes in this, make sure it makes sense. I love market research. I love obsessing over sort of who's the ideal customer profile. What are their pains and fears? What can we find out in the market? Is there a good product market fit? How is this going to differentiate in the market and stand out? If I can't pull out those things, then it's just, it's pretty much a non-starter for me. I was raised by what I call an ideapreneur as a father. And so I learned from that, that the best ideas in the entire, you can have the best ideas ever, execution is everything. And so that's really what I obsess over is making sure that we are executing at the utmost degree that we can. And yeah, I just hire people who are smarter than me, especially in areas that I'm not great at and let them sort of take the charge. And that's usually how I'm able to accomplish way more than I would either alone or me, you know, spearheading that charge. So is that really where it sounds like now that's like really your, your life story a little bit is that you saw, you know, you had your dad, you had that experience and he had a lot of great ideas, but now you're in the whole marketing, which, you know, very often it's like the best ideas are only best if people actually know they're out there and things like that, which, you know, sort of as a simplified way of advertising and marketing is like, how do you get people, how do you go out there and reach people and say, Hey, this is out there. And so does that actually, I guess really into that first question, is that leave you really sort of, I guess, for lack of a term, sort of front loaded in a company is really your what you bring in when you're, you're starting an enterprise is, is doing that market research. Is it valid? Is it viable? How do we reach to a market? And then it's sort of almost by itself. Once you can lay that in front of people, you say, Hey, here's a roadmap, go do it. And you're ready to go on to the next one. Yeah. Yeah. Literally one of the ventures I'm starting right now, I started it with a few dollars of ad spend just to test the market and see if I could produce some leads that would be interested in it or not. And it, you know, there's nothing to sell. There's nothing, right. It was just very informational. I'm a very good networker. So networked with the appropriate people and the high up positions to understand, right? I, I, I'm a musician trained, but I've been not in the music world for a decade and I'm pretty much going after the music world pretty hard. And so I said, okay, let me, let me find the appropriate people to ask these questions to that know the market way better than me that have been in the market for decades that work with some of the best people in the world. And so I started it with a few dollars of ad spend. Is this a real problem or not? Like it really tell me what's the, what's, what's really going on here. And yeah, no, you're absolutely correct. And so if I can do any kind of market research or market testing, I love that. And I think a lot of people shy away from that. So often they're like, oh, it's gotta be perfect. They gotta be this incredible creator, but there's incredible. Oh, my product has to be completely done. Or I was like, just test it, spend five bucks a day, run a couple of tests, you know, ask people to leave comments. I'm like, I'm not going to do that. I asked people to leave comments of what they think or, or, you know, you don't have to send them to a landing page. You could, you could do crafty different things to just sort of see is this messaging resonating with people. Uh, I just built a simple landing page by myself that anything, anyone with any minimal, no technical skills could do and just fill out a form if it's something you're interested in. And I was getting leads for $2. So I said, okay. And it wasn't just great marketing because it was very simple. It's just, is this something you'd be interested in? So, yeah, I've tried that approach many times in the past and I've had mixed results with that. So if, how would you tell someone just trying to test the market the first time, how would you kind of guide them or give them the direction to kind of go through the ads and stuff like throwing up a page marketing that stuff? It's pretty straightforward talking to people, but it's always kind of that digital marketing testing the waters there that gets a little murky. Even for me, I have to kind of reach out to other marketing people I know to help me with. I just can't grasp it. Can you simplify for those that maybe don't understand it or just have a hard time under, you know, testing it? Yeah. Um, well, so for me, what I'm always looking for is sort of the benefits that I'm bringing to the market. Are those things that people really like need and are they interested in and sort of always kind of maybe tying those benefits to some kind of feature or something like that to see if this is a solution that they're that they're genuinely interested in. And I almost test those as hooks. I try to make them engaging, of course, and try to make them click baity in a way if I'm really going hard on the advertising front. But if I'm really just trying to test the idea or test the concept, you know, for this instance, it would use like musicians and some problems that I thought were rampant in the music world, especially for people who are signed and then concerns people had who weren't signed. And so those are just questions I was pretty much asking. Like, hey, if you're an unsigned artist, I'm assuming you have these three problems. Is that true or not? And if you had a solution that solved that in this way, is it something that you'd be interested in? And if so, you know, grab the link, give me your email and would love to chat with you. And so sometimes I think it's trying to be almost as straightforward as possible, but still being really clear about sort of the problem and the solution that that you're trying to solve. Obviously, you know, we've all watched Shark Tank plenty of times to know, like they love it when you're solving a real problem. But it and I and I understand sort of the question that you're asking to Michael, because I feel like if we, you know, a lot of times, especially as the developer or the person who created it, it's very difficult for us to even get the 20,000 foot view, right? We've become practitioners of what we're doing, become doctors of this of this area. And so that's the sometimes the hardest part I find when I've worked with other entrepreneurs and other founders is that I just need to try to get them to come back to the 20,000 foot view to just come up with a couple different key points to then just just test in the market. And then that can be either having some call to action that I want them to do. And then I could measure that call to action. Another one could be just getting comments and asking people to comment their opinion. That can be incredible. And then the other thing is just scouring the internet. Go to Reddit, but go and read other reviews. Go and read other comments on other, you know, on the same kind of topic or problem. Reddit could be your best friend. You could find pure golden Reddit and really kind of find people's unfiltered, you know, opinions, if you will. And that can help a lot as well. And you don't even, it doesn't cost you anything, obviously, to do those things or to reach out to someone or to schedule a call with someone and say, Hey, can I just pick your brain on on this thing? And you'd be surprised how many people will respond even really high ups that you thought would never, you know, CEOs of massive companies, you name it, a lot friendlier than you think most of the time. Guys, so you kind of went out and actually you do the social marketing, not so much the adsense marketing. So you actually go out. So this is more of that. Yeah, that social networking where you're talking to people, you're getting engaged, trying to find your audience and figure out your if the problem you're trying to solve is a real problem that that the market you're trying to address is something they need. Yeah. Yeah. And I think you could do both. I think you can do both. I think the social side is nice because it can protect you. Right. It doesn't cost you anything necessarily. And it could protect the brand if you're like, Oh, I don't want anybody to know what I'm doing yet. Okay. Totally understand that. Have some private conversations. But if you have the opportunity, right. I had some hypotheses that I just wanted to know, are these accurate or not? I want the market to tell me. And if I can get a couple hundred people to raise their hand, okay, we got something here. So your company is fetching funnel. So I guess we'll dive into that little part. No pun intended, I guess of how do you see because funnels have been, you know, for those of us that a lot of us technology wise have built, you know, have built funnels in a sense, at least the apparatus without necessarily the, I guess the content and the branding and some of those kinds of things are part of a funnel. So what do you see? Let me see. It's sort of like the ideal structure of a funnel. That's a loaded question. I feel like it's very dependent on the business and the business model and the product set and whatever it is. I know, you know, there's a lot of developers that are potentially listening and a lot of softwarepreneurs and yeah, a lot of, you know, let's call it digital products, probably potentially more than physical products. And so at the, I think there's usually two or three things is the question is, do you have to educate your client heavily or not? If you have to educate your client heavily, like they don't know that this is a thing that they don't know that they need, right? If we're a CRM, everybody knows, you know, if someone's looking for a CRM, they pretty much know they need a CRM. Now they're just trying to figure out which CRM is the right solution for them. And you know, the differences between them, et cetera. So then, you know, you right, get in front of them in that way, get comparisons and get really great, you know, ways to go about it. But you're, you're doing lead gen at the end of the day for that, or you're trying to book a demo or you're trying to do something like that. Right. And so you're always trying to figure out what the conversion note is. And often, right, it is a lead or a call or a free trial or, you know, maybe someone signing up for the service. If the service is more than a thousand dollars a month, I'd very highly recommend enforcing a sales team or some sort of point of contact because it's going to be very difficult to get people to convert at that price point. And you're just probably leaving a lot of money on the table. So in that instance, it would just be trying to book calls and do instances like that. Right. And so I think the, the, the, the, the place where we get stuck or a lot of people get stuck in sort of maybe funnel versus website, this website feels very informational and choose my own journey where funnel is more, I'm choosing the journey for you. You could kind of only go in one or two directions that I sort of allow you to go in. So those, you know, creates opportunities to upsell or downsell or to cross sell or to do different things. And that's kind of what I think of most people thinking of as a traditional maybe online funnel. Um, what I think of this funnel is everything pretty much from the very first point of, of, of brand introduction to the conversion event that's happening, whether that's online or offline. And then I'm looking for holes across that entire funnel. Where can I increase conversions, leads, anything, right? And click through rates, you name it. And all I'm looking at is sort of what's, what is the conversion I'm trying to get at each point of an event. So if it's coming from an ad, I'm trying to improve, improve the click through rate. Maybe if it's a landing page, you know, maybe I'm just trying to get them to go to the next page or I'm trying to get them to fill out a form. If it's a free trial, right. Trying to get them to sign up for the free trial, whatever it is. And so that's really the, the, the biggest points that we're always trying to optimize. And sometimes having a website that is super informational and they can choose their own journey sometimes can be a little overwhelming for people because we don't want to go read a bunch or figure it out. And so that is the biggest objection you're usually trying to handle is just making sure that, that they can cut through the noise. They can really see what makes your product or service amazing and why should I be interested in you? And if I can't figure that out in like five seconds of interacting with your brand, there's a problem that you sort of, you need to solve. And and yeah, and so that's, that's kind of how we're, I'm usually really thinking about these things. And, and if you, if you take that 20,000 foot view, try to put those glasses on. Sometimes you can find opportunities that are sort of bottlenecking the business if you will. So where do you find our typical issues that, you know, a lot of this you've done, so you sort of, you're in there from the start, but maybe with the, you know, other companies or other owners and entrepreneurs and such that we work with, where do you, are there, are there typical failures that you see with it, that they essentially that they fail to consider as part of putting up a, you know, a funnel and building the brand and that kind of piece. So what are the, what are the things that are weaknesses that are, I guess we'll say like common holes that as a, you know, it's sort of cause it allows people to fall out of the funnel. Don't copy Apple. Everybody always wants to be Apple. And I understand they've got a beautiful website and they invented, you know, they were one of the first ones to do parallax and to do these cool website things, but you're not, or Apple's size. So if that's the case, you have to, you have to do the appropriate things that are necessary for your business. And I think that's a problem I see time and time and time again. And, and it's, it's rampant in the SaaS industry where so often SaaS websites are the most boring websites ever. Sorry for anybody out there. It's got a boring SaaS website, but there's opportunities to, to, to spice it up. And I love the idea of always really taking a look at the customer journey and thinking of it in the sense of, you know, your, your website is a guide to their, their journey. And if your website doesn't guide them through that customer journey, then that's sort of the biggest problem. And really making sure that, yeah, you're not kind of falling susceptible to those, well, I just want it to look really pretty, but it's not, you know, but it, you know, there's just no clear call to actions. You're you know, you're making it more difficult for me to just get in touch with you. And you know, and you're like, well, I want to look bigger than I am. And that's sometimes the biggest downfall I see with brands so often. Dismetrics was a, was a really, really big, big, you know, brand that did this. I want to be careful calling them a big brand. They were a client of ours for a long time. They had more website traffic than almost any client I ever had, but it was all unqualified. They were incredible at marketing and incredible at getting the brand out there. But all this traffic was looking for things and reading and digesting content that had nothing to do with what they actually offered. And so while everybody knew their brand and everybody knew who their name was in the marketing world, I didn't know a single person paying for their software. And we had to figure out how to completely like reposition the entire brand and software solution to cut through all of the noise as being this amazing everything for everybody solution and just dial it down to like, we do one thing incredible for one type of client. And then we were able to like 10 X the lead volume 10 X, you know, the, the, the demos that they were getting to the point where they had to hire more guys, you know, to, to book more demos and everything else. And it was, and we actually were reducing the traffic in that, but it was kind of cleaning it up in a way, if that makes sense, right. And just being really thoughtful about only retargeting key pages and key areas that we knew are more closely related to their, their customer. And I think that's a problem that so many of us make too, right. Is when we do try to be everything for everybody, I've made that mistake myself. And so it is, if you could cut through that noise, you know, add on features to them later, but just get them in for sort of like that one thing that you do better than anybody else. Well, that's actually a really good segue into some of the interesting changes in the, in the marketplace, in the digital landscape, as it were. Let me get your thoughts on, or the idea of sort of like that idea of being everybody and everyone, or, you know, for a while, everybody was like, they just wanted likes, they just want to like, but likes don't do squat if it doesn't convert to something useful. And an interesting thing that is how the marketing landscape a little bit has changed when you look at things like it, you used to have like, you know, television, you had a couple of stations and if you were on the networks and great, you saw, it was a lot of eyeballs and or if you're in radio, there were a couple of huge markets and still, I guess, you know, they own a couple and you're everywhere. Or if you're on a website, if you get on the Apple website, probably a lot of people are going to see you, you know, at Google. But now there's been this proliferation of, you have your big tier influencers and stuff like that. You're Joe Rogan's and all those kinds of people. But then you've got like this, you know, you got a next year and then you've got this, what I'll call like that bottom third tier where you've got sort of what you're talking about is you've got these people that are influencers and they may only have a few thousand people here or there that follow them, but they're devoted. They're, you know, it happens to be the influencer that does, I don't know, grape jelly and they don't have a ton of people, but the people that are like follow the grape jelly guy and girl just are avid supporters. So how do you see that changing maybe some of your approach or does it, or is it still something that's just sort of like that? It may look different, but it's actually just the same thing, you know, maybe rebranded. I love working with influencers and getting influencer marketing, sort of what you're talking about, you know, working with individuals that have some kind of influence, let's call it, right? Some kind of follower base. I'm looking at that in very specific ways though, and it's sometimes maybe a little bit less traditional than most people are really looking for those things. Now what you're talking about is, yeah, there are very large influencers, very well known influencers, and there's also micro influencers, sort of those ones that don't have a big following, but they are very influential. I could give you tons of examples where we blew up brands only working with micro influencers because sometimes they do have a stronger voice or more influence over less people. A good example was we did a campaign for Hunter Boots and we reached out to a bunch of young women in college and sent them a pair of boots. Now they don't have a big following, but you know who their following is? Other girlfriends in college, other guys in college, right? And so then they could get a dozen plus people to pretty much influence them to purchase this product, one of those was our best campaigns. And we just ended up working with a couple hundred really small influencers, if you will. Now in the tech scene, I think it's really interesting where often we can utilize an influencer almost more as like a PR push, where PR very traditionally, I'm not actually really looking for an ROI. I'm looking at how much can I leverage this PR later to then drive more, you know, either brand awareness, social proof, whatever it is, right? And so you see this a lot of times in the, you know, I think all of us are geeks and nerds here. So, right, I think a good example is like computer gear where we see it really often or we see that new computer mouse or whatever it is and you go to the website and then all of a sudden it's like there's a video review from some, you know, from tech YouTuber that we follow. I never saw that video. I didn't come to the website because of that YouTuber, but because I see that YouTuber on the website, it's giving more validation to me saying, oh, this is probably a really good product if so and so was talking about it. And so, you know, it's how you leverage that I think is the biggest piece of that, you know, very often in the brand world where we're, you know, selling physical goods, you know, it would direct to consumer brands and what have you. We want to work with influencers just to get user generated content and just get those videos to run as ads. It's not to get an ROI from that influencer saying, oh my gosh, this is the coolest product ever. Yeah, maybe we get a couple sales and that's great, but usually with influencers, I'm not looking for a direct ROI from them promoting the video or releasing the video because I think that time has sort of come and gone. You still can make a lot of money and there still are opportunities to do that and make money. But I think when you're looking at it with that lens, it becomes more singularly focused and harder to get that ROI. And you may or may not work with an influencer that could have actually positively impacted your brand more, you know, because you're trying to really track an ROI from it. But you know, just getting good content sometimes can be the gold at the end of the day and you just kind of pay them, you know, you give them the software for free or you give them the product for free and in exchange, you get this great video and you know, and then how you leverage that video can sometimes just be a much higher multiplier than the actual, you know, oh, I got a couple thousand views or whatever it is. And that is where we were going to pause our conversation with Samir. It continues to go well, as I say, pencils down, but get ready next episode because it's going to be pencils up time to take notes again. Definitely drops a couple of little products and tools and some things like that, little notes along the way that I think you definitely find useful. I will probably go back myself and catch a couple of these that I didn't write down the first time. But we also will have links in the show notes where we can for these things, particularly how to get a hold of him. Very helpful. Appreciate so much his time and spend a little time with us. And it just, you know, sometimes there's just people that are really good people that are trying to help everybody else wherever they can. Samir happens to be one of those people. So if there's anything here where you, you know, I'm sure he would love to help you. If there's any way you can help him, definitely, you know, pay it forward where you can. That being said, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. This was sponsored by RB Consulting, your partner in building smarter, scalable tech. From startups to established teams, RB Consulting helps you turn tech chaos into clarity with proven roadmaps and hands-on expertise. Visit rb-sns.com to start your next step forward. Also sponsored by Envision QA, they help businesses take control of their software by focusing on what matters most, quality, reliability, and support you can count on. Find out more at EnvisionQA.com. Thanks for tuning in to the Develop the Newer Podcast, where we're all about building better developers and better careers. I'd love to hear your thoughts or feedback, so drop a note to info at DevelopTheNewer.com. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you listen. And remember, a little bit of effort every day adds up to a great success. Keep learning, keep growing, and we'll see you in the next episode.