I’m excited to announce that the adjustments to my hypothesis (described in Part 2 – How to Make an Effective Lean Startup Hypothesis) and the corresponding changes to my website (described in Part 3 – Adjusting your Experiment to Test your Hypothesis) have provided me with some useful data.

In my original goal for the experiment, noted in Part 1 of this series, I pledged to move forward with my product idea if two people actually pay for my product.

The results
**
** I shouldn’t be surprised by the results because of my confidence in the product idea, but (drumroll, please…) nine people have paid for my product! It was an amazing feeling receiving those first few emails from PayPal saying that someone paid me $25 for my product. Of course, since I don’t actually have a product to provide them yet, I sent them a nice email thanking them for their interest and apologizing that I was unable to fulfill their order. I refunded their money right away.

**Why I’m especially excited</p>

</b>As if being paid actual money for my product idea wasn’t exciting enough, there are a few additional reasons why I’m especially excited:

  • Aside from the nine people who paid me for my product, an additional three people contacted me expressing serious interest in my product. For example, one person asked if I would ship to Canada. While the nine paying customers are much more meaningful than the people who expressed interest, it’s exciting to know that it’s even more than just those nine people with interest in the product.
  • All paying customers reached my website from organic search results. So, not only were they paying customers, but I spent $0.00 acquiring them (not counting for the minimal time I spent creating the site and optimizing it for SEO).
  • And possibly the most exciting thing to note: the people who paid me for my product bought it sight unseen! Indeed, my website does not yet have any pictures of the product on it. Creating an image of what I think the product will look like would have required too much of a time investment for me to figure out how to manipulate Photoshop enough to alter an existing product image.

**Validated</p>

</b>It might still be premature, but I’m ready to consider this product idea validated after this experiment. After all, nine people have paid me cash money for my product, sight unseen. In other words, the pain point that this product solves is great enough that people are willing to pay for a solution without even knowing what the solution looks like. For all they know, the product could be hideously ugly, but that didn’t stop nine people from shelling out real cash.

I will discuss my next steps in the next post in this series.