When launching any new startup, or any new personal project, it’s often very difficult to validate the worth of your product: Is it good enough to gain serious traction? Do people really want to use it? The best way to find those answers is often through monetization.
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Users handing over their hard-earned cash is the only real way to measure the worth of your product in a practical way. Sure, you might release a product or launch a website which gains 10,000 new users in a day, but how many of those users will really be long-term customers? If a product is released on a pay-only basis, or if the developer adds a payment option soon after launch, you are able to determine within the first month if the product will succeed.
Even more significantly, if your product doesn’t gain 10,000 new users in a day, monetization is a great way to ascertain whether the product is worth devoting more of your spare time to. There’s nothing worse than spending hundreds of hours expanding your MVP (minimum viable product) into a more fully featured service if users really aren’t interested.
Additionally, it’s all too often that founders launch a startup or project simply assuming that users will be willing to pay for the service in the future. If you test the waters within the first few months, it becomes extremely simple to figure out whether the product will be able to produce serious revenue in the future (if that’s what you’re aiming for).
Don’t fear product monetization, it’s an extremely reliable way to figure out how successful your product can potentially become.
2 Responses
I think you can still validate the product without payment, but there’s still some very good points in the article.