Overall my hit rate on new businesses that make money is like 4 out of 62. Really 3 made some money, 1 made good $ then lost a lot of $, and 1 made “significant” (to me) $.

Here’s a short story on a nicely executed discovery process that ultimately led to killing an idea … and of course a new one.

a few weeks ago i set out to build a similar product to supademo

I did about 19 customer interviews. It was the most discovery I’ve ever done before committing to a new product. I did built an mvp while on vacation over a week or so but didn’t invest too much time into it.

Based on the 19 or so conversations, these are my distilled insights about the problem space:

This is a real problem that still exists, but the solution I had in mind didn’t satisfy the need. It was also fascinating to watch people say a thing solved a problem but then their actual usage of the tool said otherwise. So yes, perhaps I didn’t conduct these interviews “well” enough but it’s extremely difficult to them without bias. Yes, I’ve read The Mom Test.

I could have explored the solution space to come up with a concept that did satisfy those needs but I didn’t. I stopped here.

While it was a nicely run process, it actually didn’t lead to a result different than I would have achieved by not having those conversations and just asking people to sign up / pay (which I would have struggled with given the solution didn’t solve the problem). Now of course I better understand why the solution doesn’t solve the problem but the end result is the same … a product that didn’t work.

A new idea

Supersend.io is an email sending tool that hasn’t been growing much lately. I wanted to change that, so like many of you i went to google ads and started spending. I was getting conversions but I wanted to know exactly who these users were that signed up from google ads. About 5 hours and lot of bad youtube videos later I gave up and coded a quick attribution system to link user signups with google ads clicks.

Then of course, I thought, man if this is hard for me, either I’m an idiot or this is a pain for many folks. Of course if you have sufficient time / engineering resources you could build this yourself but my sneaking suspicion is that many folks have terrible attribution and have no idea if google ads or facebook ads are actually profitable for them. Or even without ads … everyone has some kind of seo strategy but is that bringing in users? More importantly, is it bringing in users that convert to paid? I needed to know for myself so I added a way to track signups from organic google search as well.

I noticed that day after day i was using the dashboard I built more and more and thought, shoot, I think this is a product. so hence a new idea. the product is userattribution.com which I’m astonished was available.

It provides a dashboard like this:

I can say with certainty what my costs are per signup via google ads. I can say with certainty the ltv of customers from google ads as a channel (as well as churn). I’m sure there are about 10,000 different ways people have set this up for themselves but i couldn’t find it. You drop in a script tag, connect your accounts and voila, an actually useful dashboard that should inform ad spend.

So I’ve started this process again from scratch. There are 5 users, nearly 1 paying customer (looks promising!) and I haven’t even set up website analytics yet.

Hey, my hit rate is pretty low but at least this one has value for me personally.

Quick Question: If you have thoughts on what I should cover, feel free to reply, don’t be shy!

Andrew