Excellent question! While at the moment I’m working on 2 larger projects which are taking up 150% of my time, FrontendSource has enabled me to create a dialogue with many of my users, and now I have a direct line to ask questions to these users and see if the ideas I have are something they’d be interested in using. For example, I could reach out to them and ask if they have any projects that are sitting on the sidelines gathering dust that they might be interested to sell, or if they have complex UI components that are fully built, high quality and that they would like to bundle into a pack with other UI components (just spitballing random ideas here).
If I want to test the above ideas, I’ll have to develop a bit, but perhaps I don’t need a full payment system to start. Maybe I can just use Gumroad, or PayPal with manual sending of assets, etc. There are many ways to test a product manually without coding the thing. I mean, Groupon started as an excel sheet and email list (as did ProductHunt, I believe). With Zapier, AirTable and all these other new shiny tools at our disposal, we’ve got options… and options are good.
It is difficult to test without extensive development, but what I’m really pushing in this article is that we need to work our way down to the most simplest thing we can validate before moving on. Now, that doesn’t mean making something crap, then trying to sell it, and finally giving up when no one wants it. What it means, is that most products are built around a central point of value, and if I have an idea of something to sell, I should try to first sell the smallest ‘sellable’ amount of that value. Once that is done, I can build more and see what aspects of that value people are most interested in. It’s not an easy process, to say the least, but if we focus on the smallest unit of value rather than trying to deliver perfection and tons of features no one cares about, we’re going to get much better feedback from our market and save a ton of time by only building what people are actually willing to pay for.