Over the past few years I’ve launched more than 20 side projects, almost of all of which failed to get traction. I decided I’d had enough - I needed to be more ruthless about filtering and testing my ideas before wasting my precious free time on them (I have a day job and two young kids, free time is minimal). The problem I found was that there’s a lot of work involved with testing an idea. Just thinking about the design and copy on a landing page could take me days, during which my lizard brain would constantly be telling me “just build it you fool!”.

I built Yep.so to make it much faster to launch and test ideas with real customers. It removes most of the design decisions, guides you through writing good copy, and uses the best-practice landing page structure devised by Harry Dry from Marketing Examples. It also gives you instant stats on how many people are viewing your page and how many signup.

I use it to quickly test new ideas and compare them to the performance of other ideas. It quickly becomes clear which I should be discarding and which have potential.

I’ve got a decent following on Twitter and have been building the app in public, so most users have been coming from there. I think my first paid customers did too.

I tweet a lot about Yep, everything from features I’m thinking of adding to the challenges of trying to build a successful SaaS. The app is freemium, so free users can create a page but it will have a “Powered by Yep.so” badge at the bottom which actually brings in a decent amount of users.



I also have a few B2B customers, which are founder communities who use Yep to help their members test ideas rapidly. I got these by sending DMs to people I knew who run communities, or by asking friends for introductions to community leads they knew.

Don’t make the mistakes I did. I was coming up with completely random ideas and trying to make them into businesses. Now I realise that even if I build a perfect app, if I can’t distribute it, I’ll fail. So I always think about distribution first.

Some questions I ask myself:
- What groups am I in where I can identify a critical problem that I could solve?
- Does this group have the ability/willingness to pay for solutions?
- If I build it, do I know how I’ll get my first 10 customers? I strongly prioritise ideas where the answer is yes.
- Do I have a rough plan how to get the next 1000 customers? A business needs consistent distribution.

Above all I believe it’s a numbers game, so if you can reduce the cost (financial and your own energy) of failure to almost nothing, you’re maximising your chances of success at some point.