Adding animated gradient buttons to your Bubble app

In today's issue:

1. Adding animated gradient buttons to your Bubble app

2. The Sidehustler's Guide to Idea Validation

Enjoy 🤞

Adding animated gradient buttons to your Bubble app

In the last couple of issues, we have looked at different ways to CSS code to improve our Bubble apps visually. Here is another one: Have a look at my super short step-by-step guide.

The Sidehustler's Guide to Idea Validation

As a side hustler of a solo founder, it's tempting to start building based on an idea. Especially if you build on no-code, but that usually does not end well. I've done it quite some times, only to discover dozens of hours of work later that nobody was interested in what I have built. On the other hand, it's also easy to get lost in the tons of books and frameworks on structuring and validating business ideas. Let's leave that to the corporate innovation folks. 

So, how can you validate your business idea in a simple yet effective way before building a product? From my POV, validating a side hustle idea needs to be done within five days or less while still addressing the most critical startup risks. What are these risks? It's hard to generalize, but from my VC and weekend project experience, I found that most startups fail because either:

1. Nobody needs their product.

2. They can't acquire customers efficiently.

3. The founders give up before nailing points 1 and 2. 

Based on the above, I propose a simple 3-question framework to de-risk your ideas as simply and quickly as possible before starting to build: 

1. Is there anyone that really needs your product?

In this step, you want to examine whether your target customers actually care about the problem you want to solve for them. 

• 1.1) Define clear hypotheses for your target customer (who are they and where can you find them) and what problem you are solving for them. In a world of abundance where everyone is competing for a user's time and money, you want to solve a real, pressing, and frequent problem.

• 1.2) Prepare for interviewing target users: Read the Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick. Seriously, please do it. The audio version on 1.3x speed takes less than three hours to listen to, and it's worth every second. If that's still too much, watch the 16min video below. Asking the wrong questions during customer interviews might give you highly biased and misleading data.

• 1.3) Talk to a minimum of five target users to validate your hypotheses about the customer and problem using the Mom Test. I know that's uncomfortable, but it might be the single most crucial step in your journey.

2. Can you acquire your target users efficiently?

In this step, you want to validate if you can find an efficient way to reach your target audience to sell them your product. Nailing distribution is arguably the most challenging task of building a business, and you are likely not able to de-risk this completely before building your product. But there are some steps you can take to get indicative data, e.g., using smoke tests:

• 2.1) Define a clear hypothesis on how you will acquire your users (e.g., search, paid, referrals, etc.) and what the associated key metrics should be (e.g., cost of acquiring one user). Ideally, acquiring one user is around one-fifth of the user's LTV (Life-Time-Value).

• 2.2) Design and conduct a smoke test. For example, you could build a landing page, making it look like the product already existed. Add a call to action (e.g., buy now, sign up, subscribe, etc.). On click, refer the user to a 'we are not yet ready' page and ask them to sign up to a waiting list. Use the channel defined in 2.1 and generate some traffic to your site. Just google 'smoke test,' and you will find a ton of resources.

• 2.3) Check back if the data generated in 2.2 is in line with your target metrics from 2.1. Don't focus on the total number. It does not matter if 10 or 1000 users signed up. The critical question is how much you paid per signup or waitlist entry. Such a small-scale experiment is also a great way to test your pricing. 

Pro tip: Engage with the users collected in 2.2. and try to talk to them to validate your problem (see step 1). These are the people that signed up, i.e., your most likely users. Are they the same people as you hypothesized in 1.1?

3. Are you the right founder for this?

There are two essential questions here:

• 3.1) Can you stick with it? The road to success is long and hard. And giving up early only leads to a massive waste of time. How will your work look like 12 months from now? Right now, you might be busy building a product on Bubble. Still, in 12 months from now, you might be busy writing documentation, shooting promo videos, creating copy text for content marketing, doing customer support, etc. Would you still enjoy that? 

• 3.2) Do you understand the industry and required technology well enough to build and sell a good enough product? If not, can you learn it in a reasonable time? Can you get other people to help you?

But what about...?

Some other things founders often obsess about that IMO don't matter much for a solo business are:

• Is anyone doing it already? I hear that one often. Unless another company already dominates a market, it does not matter. It can even be good for you as competitors help define the category. Most markets are big enough for multiple players. 

• Is it defensible? In software, you can seldom build a moat based on the product itself. But neither can your competitors. It all comes down to execution. 

• Is the market big enough? If you are building a solo business or a side hustle, the answer is almost always yes. 

• Is the timing right? For some ideas, the timing might matter. But there is no reliable way to tell upfront. Time will tell. So you might as well ignore this. What is essential is to make sure that your users have the need and the ability to use your product today. 

TLDR

You can also forget all of the above and ask yourself: What are the three most essential things that need to hold true for your business to work. Then find a way to gather data to prove/disprove your hypotheses. The key message is simple: get out of your house and collect unbiased, real-world data. 

Join the discussion

That's it. I hope you got some value out of reading this. 

Do you want me to write about a specific topic, or do you have an awesome Bubble hack you would like to share? I'd love to hear from you, and I'm looking forward to engaging on Twitter (@DamianJanzi), in the post comments, or the Bubble forum. 

Also, if you like this newsletter, why not forward it to a friend :)

That’s it. See you in two weeks.

Keep it simple!

Damian

👉 twitter.com/DamianJanzi

👉 bubblehacks.io