[Week 3] Building in Public - Validation

This was a week of rabbit holes. I almost didn't write this post since I felt I didn't have concrete progress to report. But that's the whole point of building in public. Sharing what exactly happens each week, including my confusion.

🐇 Rabbit Hole #1 - The SaaS testimonial use case

I talked to 3 first-degree SaaS founders. Like I shared in the last post, tying the friction-less, one-time testimonial process to conversion seems relevant but not urgent. But this is not conclusive. And hence rabbit hole. I am now further breaking down what type of SaaS company and what point of conversion (top of the funnel e.g. outbound email vs mid-funnel e.g. onsite/demo page conversion).

🐇 Rabbit Hole #2 - The e-commerce product page use case

I got caught up in exploring this use case simultaneously. Call it a hunch or a distraction or ignorance. But I am very curious to know that if I am viewing a product page, let's say a yellow shirt, and I view real customer videos of that very yellow shirt alongside the listing - how impactful would it be on influencing a sale.

I want to thank Rishi Rawat, the Shopify product page guy for taking the time to share some wonderful thoughts over a call on this. Reviews are a very crowded space on the Shopify app store and otherwise but we outlined the true problems and impact of the visual impact on product selling. Some conclusions:

1. Low confidence (new brands, unknown) & high ticket size products could use more live, real customer testimonials (video). Think of health supplements or an expensive vacuum cleaner.
2. Products that already have 100+ reviews i.e. folks that are more serious about their reviews might be amenable to improving this process.
3. Other apps might be doing video testimonials but the real problem is how do we get "higher efficacy" videos. How do we get well-made, well articulated user-generated videos vs poor ones that we cannot use. The value should be "personalized tv commercial"

🐇 Rabbit Hole #3 - User-generated content for e-commerce (non-customer content)

Brands do not need 30 videos of 30 customers buying the same yellow shirt. Why and how would that get consumed? Maybe they could use a highlight reel, if there is a way to merge different customer testimonial into one short reel.

Also, another aid to increase conversions for D2C e-commerce brands is generating fresh user-generated content across distributions channels.

This is still in the realm of our conversion problem but is not a customer testimonial.

Where we are

I am still doing more interviews and will be zeroing in on our learnings shortly.