The cheapest way to find out whether something is worth building is a page that describes it and asks for money.
What the page contains
What it does. One sentence, concrete. Not a category, not a vision.
Who it is for. Specific enough that the right person recognises themselves and the wrong one does not respond.
What it costs. A real number.
One way to respond. A payment, a deposit, or a single field.
That is one screen. Everything else you want to add is delaying the answer.
| Signal | Means |
|---|---|
| Somebody pays | Real |
| A deposit | Real |
| A specific message about their situation | Nearly real |
| An email sign-up | Weak |
| "Great idea" | Nothing |
| Social approval | Nothing |
The price is what makes it a test
A page with no price measures curiosity.
Everybody says yes to something free and hypothetical. Put a number on it and the responses separate into people who have a problem and people who were being pleasant.
If a real price makes you uncomfortable, that discomfort is the test working. Put it there anyway.
Say it is not built
Plainly, on the page. In development, expected in March, taking deposits.
That is honest and it costs you almost nothing, because somebody with the problem will still respond. Somebody who will not wait was never going to be an early customer.
Take a deposit rather than full payment, and say you will refund it if the date slips and they would rather not wait. That is fair and it does not reduce the signal.
What is not a signal
Encouragement from people who know you. Approval on social platforms. Sign-ups on a list with no price attached.
All of it feels like progress and none of it predicts revenue. People are generous with agreement and careful with money, which is why the money is the measurement.
Count two things: payments, and messages describing a specific situation in detail. A long message about somebody's actual problem is close to a payment, because they have spent effort.
If nobody responds
That is the result, and it arrived in a week.
The alternative was six months of building followed by the same silence. Change the page, change the audience, change the price, or change the idea, all of which are cheap now.
A page that fails is the cheapest thing you will build.
Two neighbouring cases are worth a look: How to make a product landing page and How to make an email capture page.
Put it at an address
Write one page rather than a product, put a real price on it, say plainly it is not built yet, offer one way to respond, and count only payments and specific messages.