Previous installments: Day 0: the ground rules Day 1: idea number one Today’s going to be on the shorter side as I’m still busy emailing folks. Also, I’d love to do a comprehensive post on my early validation attempts in a few days, after I’ve tried a few more channels. The start of validation I have three primary goals with this early stage of validation: Find which group of people have the best response rate Find which channel of sourcing these folks yields the best response rate Of course, find a real interest in my idea #1 and #2 are to let me find one or two specific channels that work in terms of response rate, and double down in what works. Yesterday, I mentioned there were 5 different groups of people I might sell this to. Today, I’ve focused my efforts on the two groups I assume will have the best response: . UX leadership/seniors and Product Managers I hit my goal of reaching out to 10 targeted prospects, and even this small number turned out to be a great exercise in finding my audience. For the first few rounds, : I’ll be testing two different cold audience channels (you can search for tweets containing images which is super handy in my case: ) Using this, I found companies who were having a recent influx of customers pinging support with errors Bystander.io could help fix. Leveraging Twitter search filter:images “error message” This helped in solidifying who’s thinking about these user-facing error messages the most — authors were exclusively UX folks. I followed this breadcrumb trail to see what either the authors or interested commenters belonged to. Blog posts about error messages business So for my cold outreach, I had a blog post to discuss or a real example use-case from their customers. Here’s a pixelated view of my prospecting spreadsheet: There’s better ways to track this, but at this early scale a Google doc will do just fine! Tomorrow, now that I have the beginnings of a method to prospect these two channels, I’ll push out messages to another group of folks. And I’ll message 10 people in a new channel, to begin opening up testing response rates from different sources in parallel to these two. Scaffolding the actual app. Yesterday I also mentioned I’d like to get a seed going for the app itself. A this point we want the pipes that can leveraged in any idea we might pivot into, so we scrap as little development time as possible if we kill this first idea. I started out as a front end dev, and I’m most comfortable with . So we’ll be going fullstack JS to make sure I can move fast, using technology I’m most familiar with (there is one exception, we’ll get to that!) JavaScript The (MEAN+extras) stack: on the front end (a frontend that requires Typescript will be a nice help while we’re building) Angular 5+ : it looks like we’ll go with the as a starting point. Bootstrap Nebular theme on the backend with Node Express + (hosted on MLabs for the free development tier while we hack things together) MongoDB mongoose for authentication, this will save a ton of time, and their technical content team is amazing. Auth0 Now, for the unfamiliar, something I’ve really wanted to put to use in a project is . I know it’s only recommended for larger apps as there’s a lot of boilerplate and a bit of a learning curve. But, this inclusion is to sprinkle in a fun challenge. And the debugging options with a single source of state are awesome. We’ll use . Redux NgRx Tomorrow, day 3! More validation, of course. I think I’ll pull the trigger on . I don’t like putting up a full landing page until I have static mockups for screenshots, so I’d like to test Ship as a pre-official-landing-page solution. Product Hunt’s Ship I’ll set up my authentication service in Angular to wire up , using some of to help speed this along. Auth0 Kim Maida’s awesome posts And I’ll try to fix my woodstove, ‘cause it’s cold in here. As always if you have any feedback or want to chat or drop a comment here :-) Thanks for reading! my email is on my website Back to day 1. Forward to day 3.

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