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Hey there - it's Brian 👋

Do people want your new business?

How do you start validating online?

Let’s help you choose from the two basic method:
1. Micro-MVP: Post your idea online. Build alongside community feedback.
2. Build a landing page. Drive people to it with paid ads.

The right method for you depends on your goals!

So read on and I’ll help you avoid the wrong method.

💣 It’s battle time:

The Micro-MVP vs Landing Page + Paid Ads.

Let’s make your business an outlier: 👇

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Would you rather build with your community or send new traffic?

The main difference is whether you want to build with a community or new traffic.

Paid ads drive customers to your landing page to see if they sign up (or not).

Testing your idea on socials:
• Post content to solve people’s problems
• They join your public community (i.e., follow you)
• And give you constant feedback as you build the solution they need.

Paids ads are fast. You get as much traffic as you’re willing to pay.

Testing and building with community is less risky. You get more intimate feedback from your customers and you make 100s of small adjustments until you get the business customers need.

I’ll explain when you test with community vs with cold traffic (and at the end I’ll cover a way to blend both):

🧪 Micro-MVP: Test and Build With Community

The Micro-MVP tests your idea on socials: it builds you a public community of passionate people who tell you what they need.

Removes the guess-work and turns them into raving fans to make it hard to keep up with demand.

🧭 Best used when:

1. You’re willing to build community in exchange for lower-risk:
You’ll have small insights in week one. Though expect time for the community to form. As community builds you get faster insights and more customers.

2. You have a rough idea of your problem or target customer:
It’s hard to build community if you have a wildly different focus. Micro-MVP insights will help you get more specific, but you have to be in one general industry OR in one general problem.

💎 Benefits:

1. The Snowball Community:
Raving fans share your ideas with other raving fans. There’s no limit to how quickly you can grow.

It’s like a snowball going down hill.

You take time to pack your snowball together at the top, then let it roll and grow until it’s hard to keep up with demand.

2. Use Community For Everything As You Grow:
Your social platform starts as a way to validate, then you use it as:
• A way to get customers
• A way to test new launches (products, new customer types)
• A way to test marketing campaigns

Any testing you do gets people into your ecosystem. Those people share your campaigns so anything you do has an impact. Nothing goes to waste.

3. Frequent Feedback
The platform makes it easy to keep a conversation going with your customers. Getting rapid live feedback. Making faster and more accurate adjustments to your business.

4. Public Social Proof
Everyone can see how many + how engaged your customers are. People with that same problem won’t want to miss out and they’ll join.

Curious people follow along, learn how valuable you are, and convert to sales.

5. Objection Feedback:
Hearing why people don’t buy means you can fix the problem so people don’t have a reason to say “no.”

Hear why not by polling or posting questions in your community.

📢 Landing page + Paid Ads: Test with Cold Traffic

Put your idea on a landing page, drive traffic to it with paid ads, adjust the landing page if you don’t get the results you want. Iterate.

I have a friend who tested 1 idea a week this way.

She had a $5,000 budget on ads. She had a few campaigns running at a time so she was spending $1,000 a week on ads.

That meant she had 5 weeks to find her business (or she’s out of a business). Luckily on her 5th idea she promised herself she’d figure out her positioning and make it work.

It worked for her, but it’s not for everyone.

🧭 Best used when:

1. You need an answer fast:
The idea takes off or doesn’t. In many cases the idea could have worked, but just needed to adjust positioning.

2. Your idea is location-specific:
You can target ads at a specific location. Do-able organically, but harder.

3. You want to test a wide range of topics:
You just want a business and don’t care what field it’s in. Wildly different fields are hard to build a community around.
(e.g., e-commerce vs design studio vs business consulting)

💎 Benefits:

1. Great for targeting traffic
You can say where you want people from, interests, etc. You can get them pretty specific

2. Great to get traffic quickly
Spend more money and you can get a lot of eyeballs. Get as much as you need to drive traffic to your landing page and see who’s interested.

3. Confidence in your action
Getting people to sign up and part with their money is one of the most accurate ways to tell if people actually want it

Your Compromise (As Promised)

It doesn’t have to be one or the other.

Option 1:
If you want to keep the community around your business, but want the fast traffic from paid ads: make a social post, then pay to boost it.

It’s a way to sped up the community building.

Option 2:
Use the Micro-MVP to build your business with the community, then once there’s a community of people who love your business, use paid ads to drive traffic to your already passionate community.

That’s my approach.

And that’s it this week!

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See you next Thursday 👋

Brian
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🛠️ Outlier Links

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🧔🏻‍♂️ Brian’s Life

I’m writing to you from Lisbon. Beautiful city. Tomorrow I fly to Valencia to visit my friend Grammar Hippy.

Any tips for Valencia?

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