[redtexture]

I will sidestep particular suggestions for a general comment.

One kind of general background is taking (many) steps toward figuring out who your market is, and not assuming that you understand the target population, which translates into: What is the business model that will work for your idea, and how should my idea change as a consequence of what I learn?

Steve Blank's venture / startup blog discusses fairly frequently the search (and iteration on the search, and the learning involved during the search) for a business model, answering the question: Who is the population that is willing to pay for the service? This is a distinctly different from the the search for, construction of (and iteration on) a minimum viable product or service.

Nobody really knows their market when they start, or how to find it. They discover it by trying many things, in many populations, revising as they go, from learning experience to learning experience.

Asking people to pay, right now, is a very instructive process toward discovery of your business model. You might have a perfect product, but no buyers. Find the buyers. Ask people why they're not a buyer.

See:

An MVP is not a Cheaper Product, It’s about Smart Learning http://steveblank.com/2013/07/22/an-mvp-is-not-a-cheaper-pro...

Who’s Doing the Learning? http://steveblank.com/2013/06/03/whos-doing-the-learning/

[majesticbeans]

Hi again. So, say I have a mailing list of about 500 people, and I want to know if they will pay for what I currently have has my MVP. How do I do that? Do I just open them up to registration and see what happens? Should I test on a subset of those people? If I need to pivot, can I re-email those same people in the test group that declined to purchase the first time around? And what if they did purchase and they are enjoying the original product?

Still a bit perplexed.

also: Is AdWords necessary?

[majesticbeans]

Thanks for that. My service up until this point has been basically a giant research project from Day 1. Before I built anything, I met with firms that work in the segment I was researching both large and small. Then I built from there.

Thanks for bringing up Steve Blank again. I have the 4 Steps and I should probably revisit that in addition to his blog .

[redtexture]

Another post with a similar line of thinking, on testing for paying customers:

Mark Suster - Why You Need to Ring the Freaking Cash Register

http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2013/07/16/ring-the-freak...

Perhaps you've seen this too, about discovery of interested populations of potential users:

Paul Graham - Do things that don't scale (July 2013)

http://paulgraham.com/ds.html