Essay · ~15 min read

Fake Door / Smoke Test

Kromatic (The Real Startup Book) · kromatic.com Free Intermediate

This is the most concrete walkthrough of how to test a niche when you have nothing built yet: put up a page describing the offer and count who actually clicks or signs up. It treats a click as a behavior, not an opinion, which is exactly the difference between real demand and polite interest. It gives you the seven steps, rough benchmarks, and the ethics of an honest reveal page, so you can run it this week for almost no money.

  • A click or an email is a behavioral signal, worth far more than someone saying they like the idea
  • Set your success threshold and sample size before you start, so you cannot rationalize a weak result
  • Be honest on the reveal page ("coming soon, join the list") so the test does not burn trust in your own niche
Open on kromatic.com ↗

It answers 12 questions

  1. What does 'validating an idea' actually mean?
  2. When is my product 'ready' to launch?
  3. How do I build up an audience before I launch so it's not just crickets?
  4. How do I run a landing-page / 'fake-door' test?
  5. What does a 'soft launch' actually look like, and is it just a cop-out for being scared to ship?
  6. I keep tweaking the landing page instead of launching. How do I tell polishing from procrastinating?
  7. I want to test my idea before writing any code. What actually is a landing-page or concierge MVP and how do I run one right?
  8. How do I decide the single riskiest assumption my MVP should test instead of trying to prove the whole idea at once?
  9. How do I test whether a niche is real before I commit months of building to it?
  10. Should I gate my launch behind a waitlist, or does a waitlist just kill the momentum I worked to build?
  11. I am a domain expert but not a builder, is my idea real or just insider bias?
  12. Is a waitlist with a lot of signups actual proof of demand?

Read with it

  1. The single best thing ever written on customer conversations. It teaches you to ask about the customer's life and past... momtestbook.com Book · ~130 pages The Mom Test Rob Fitzpatrick
  2. This is the founder essay that made the case for validating before you build, from the person who did it with Buffer. Gascoigne... Medium (Joel Gascoigne, co-founder of Buffer) Essay How to successfully validate your idea with a Landing Page MVP Joel Gascoigne
  3. The permission slip to recruit users by hand, do things manually, and deliver 'insanely great' experiences to your first few... paulgraham.com Essay · ~15 min read Do Things That Don't Scale Paul Graham
  4. The canonical fake-door test, told by the founder who ran it. Buffer started as a two-page site: one page pitched the tool, a... Buffer Article · ~10 min read Idea to Paying Customers in 7 Weeks: How We Did It Joel Gascoigne
  5. Video · ~25 min How to Talk to Users Eric Migicovsky
  6. Turns the vague feeling of product-market fit into a number you can move. Ask users how they would feel if they could no longer... First Round Review Article · ~20 min read How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit Rahul Vohra
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