How to Validate Your Startup Idea Over a Weekend (4 Easy Steps)

About East Meets Dress

East Meets Dress is the first modern fashion company to bring more Asian-American representation and inclusion to the traditional wedding industry by combining contemporary cultural designs, quality craftsmanship, and a dedicated customer experience. 

The idea for East Meets Dress (EMD) originated from our co-founder, Jenn’s, personal struggles when she was looking for a modern version of the cheongsam, a traditional Chinese wedding dress. She wanted to wear a cheongsam for her wedding tea ceremony to honor her parents and heritage but finding a modern design that fit her aesthetics turned out to be near impossible and much more difficult than finding her white wedding dress. 

How did we validate our startup idea?

When we first started, we had no experience in fashion, e-commerce, or entrepreneurship. We simply had our own experiences as consumers. We also weren’t sure how many other Asian-American brides out there were also struggling with this problem.

So we decided to just start small and test out our idea quickly. 

We spent a Friday night creating a free landing page via Unbounce and running a $50 FB ad to see if anyone within our target demographic would be interested. Over a weekend, we got 40+ interested subscribers through our simple landing page, which gave us the initial reassurance that there might actually be a market for this.

Here are the 4 steps we took to find product-market fit over a weekend:

1. Build a landing page

Utilize a site like Unbounce to build a simple, free landing page overnight. Include your mission, the problem you’re trying to solve and why. Make sure to highlight what makes your product or service standout and add images that would help enhance the page. Put yourself in your target customer’s shoes and think about what would convince them to take a chance on this new product/company.

2. Drive traffic to your landing page

Post your landing page in various channels across social media and sites where your target customer would be. Run a $50 ad on FB or Google, which allows you to be more specific in your targeting. You can also tap into your network and ask friends and family to help promote your landing page.

3. Collect email addresses/contact information

Once you have people visiting your landing page, you’ll want to collect their email addresses or some way of contacting them. You can easily embed a subscribe button on the landing page or have a sign-up button that lets them schedule a call with you to learn more depending on what your product/service entails. Set a goal for how many contacts you expect and would like to collect in a weekend and see whether you meet that goal.

   4. Have an action plan for what you want to do with the contacts you’ve collected

After you’ve done all the work of launching a landing page and gathering interested leads, you need to have an action plan for following up and converting these potential customers. Think through what type of experience you would want them to have after they’ve given you their contact information and have expressed an interest in your product.

Make sure that you’re swift in following up with these leads because they are the highest potential customers and you don’t want them to have forgotten about you before you’ve even reached out to them!

Hopefully, these 4 steps are helpful and remember the most important thing is to just get started and then improve over time!