How-To Guides

A practical guide to cold email and outreach for founders at the validation stage. Covers list building, message framing, follow-up cadence, and qualifying replies into discovery calls.

How to use build-in-public to generate early momentum for a validation experiment. What to share, when to share it, which platforms to use, and how to turn followers into signups.

A step-by-step guide to running customer discovery interviews that reveal real buyer pain — not what people think you want to hear. Covers recruiting, script writing, and turning notes into decisions.

How to create a waitlist page that collects quality signups, not just email addresses. Covers page structure, qualification questions, confirmation email, and how to use a waitlist to validate demand.

How to run meaningful A/B tests on a validation site: what's worth testing, what isn't, how to get enough traffic, and how to read results at low volume.

What a good conversion rate looks like for validation sites, which on-page elements actually move the number, and when to stop optimizing and start interpreting the data you have.

Practical distribution tactics for getting the first 100 email signups on a pre-product validation site: organic, community, outreach, and paid.

A practical framework for finding product market fit, including leading indicators to track, how to structure a 30–60 day validation experiment, and how to make the pivot-vs-persevere call with data.

A practical guide to writing a SaaS value proposition that passes the stranger test — a person who doesn't know you reads it and immediately knows whether it's for them.

A tactical framework for validating a startup idea in 30 days using organic traffic, a minimal site, fake-door pricing, and pre-set kill criteria.

A practical pre-launch, launch, and post-launch checklist for indie hackers shipping an MVP validation site — with brief explanations for each item.

What belongs on a minimum viable landing page for idea validation — and what to leave out until you've confirmed demand.