Imagine you want to enter a super crowded online survey market with a new product.

You must be either crazy or know this smart approach that helped guys from Fieldboom to successfully do exactly this without millions of investments.

Moreover, they managed to get first paying customers before having a product.

Here’s how they managed to achieve this:

1. Before having a product they wanted to figure out what current competitors are missing.

2. They created a simple Facebook ad.

3. They targeted it on the followers of the biggest competitor SurveyMonkey only.

4. The ad asked a simple question “Frustrated with SurveyMonkey? Take a few minutes to tell us why and we’ll give you free lifetime access to Fieldboom when it launches.”

5. The ad led to a simple online survey with these questions:

• Are you a current SurveyMonkey customer?
• What do you like the most about SurveyMonkey?
• What do you like the least about SurveyMonkey?
• Which one thing would you change about it if you had a magic wand?
• Your first name and email address?
• Would you be available to talk further with us on the phone?

6. This way they collected almost 300 responses in a few weeks.

7. The responses showed them what their product should be: simple, features that automate a lot of the manual work, user experience, not confusing pricing.

8. They spoke to 28 of the people. To end each of these discovery phone calls, they asked one critical question:

Would you be willing to pre-pay $200 for lifetime access to Fieldboom?

Of the 28 people, 8 said yes. And they all paid, within a day of the call.

9. Then they scaled this approach to get their first 100 paying customers before the launch of their product.

The key lesson:

Hearing “yes, I’d use your product” means nothing.

“Shut up and take my money” is the ultimate form of validation of the product/market fit.