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Before you quit your job or spend money on a new business, find out if people will pay for your product or service. You can validate your business idea in about two weeks by using Bolt to build a landing page with a waitlist. Once you know how many visitors join the waitlist or click a price, you have evidence to decide if your idea is worth pursuing. This article helps you take the first step from coming up with your idea to gaining your first paying customer. Each section follows the example of Maya, an apartment cleaner who keeps seeing the same problem: Property managers often have to wait days for a cleaner to turn over an empty unit, which costs the manager rent. Maya wants to test whether her idea, a move-out cleaning business for property managers, will be successful. She doesn’t have any customers yet and doesn’t want to rush into leaving her day job. To see each step of Maya’s test, from writing her hypothesis to deciding whether to build, watch the video. This article covers the same steps, with example prompts you can copy for your own business.

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Write a hypothesis you can test

Friends and family may tell you they love your idea, but their support doesn’t show whether customers will pay for your product or service. To get evidence from real prospective customers, start with a hypothesis, which is a statement that predicts what will happen when you test your idea. It should include four parts:
  • Who it’s for: A specific group of people who’ll benefit from your product or service.
  • The problem: What problem you’re solving or need you’re meeting for that group.
  • The proof: An action that shows people in your target group care, like joining a waitlist or clicking a price.
  • The time limit: How long you’ll run the test before deciding if there’s evidence your business will work.
For example, these hypotheses fit three different businesses:

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Set a bar for success

Before you launch, decide what numbers would show that your idea is viable. This helps you be objective later when you look at the results of your test. Maya’s bar for two weeks:
  • 50 visits to her page
  • 10 waitlist signups
  • 5 signups who turn over two or more units a month
  • 5 clicks on a price
  • 3 booked calls with signups she emails
Your numbers depend on your business and how many people you can reach. Pick numbers that would make you confident enough to keep going.

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Decide when to stop

Also write down a stop rule: what would make you stop or rethink the idea. For example, Maya’s stop rule is that if she changes the page twice and the pricing twice and still doesn’t reach her bar, she’ll rethink the idea.

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Build a landing page

Your landing page should get the right people to take one action, so say clearly who it’s for and what problem it solves. Maya’s page talks to property managers and explains that empty units waiting on a cleaner cost them money. You don’t need a finished brand with a professionally designed logo to get started. Pick a working name for your business and wait to get a logo and other designs after you see people saying yes to your idea. Maya decides to start with the business name Turnover Ready.

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Write your first prompt

To keep Bolt focused, tell it what to build and what not to build. Your prompt can follow this structure:
  • Context: Who you are and what you’re testing.
  • Core job: The action you want visitors to take.
  • Do not build: Parts of the landing page, site, or app you don’t need yet.
The examples below use this structure. Copy the one that’s closest to your business and change the details.
Each example builds the landing page, the waitlist, and a pricing test in one prompt. The next two sections explain how the waitlist and the pricing test work. For more ways to get the results you want from Bolt, see Prompting effectively.

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How your waitlist works

A waitlist shows you who’s interested, how to contact them, and how well they fit the group you’re building for. This can help you prioritize who to contact first. When someone signs up for the waitlist, ask them to provide an email and answer a qualifying question, which shows how good a fit they are. Maya’s waitlist asks how many units a manager turns over each month. She plans to contact managers with a lot of turnover first and managers with fewer units later. Good qualifying questions ask about something the person already does, like how often they have the problem or how much of it they deal with. For example:
  • Meal-prep subscription: How many people do you cook for?
  • Invoicing app: How many invoices do you send each month?
Bolt saves waitlist signups in your project’s database.

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How fake door pricing works

A fake door pricing test shows prices for a product or service that isn’t available yet. When someone clicks a price, you learn what they’d be willing to pay, without charging them anything. When you can measure how often people click on a price, that gives you stronger evidence than if you were to subjectively ask people how much they’d pay. To set up a fake door pricing test:
  • Show two or three pricing options. Maya shows a standard clean for $225, a clean with a 24-hour guarantee for $295, and a monthly plan for $799.
  • When someone clicks a price, show a note that says you’re not taking orders yet, with the waitlist form right below it. That way, someone who clicks can still sign up.
  • Track the clicks on each price, even when people don’t sign up.
Be honest in your note that the product or service isn’t available yet. Maya’s note says, “Turnover Ready isn’t taking bookings yet.” An honest note keeps the trust of the people you hope will become your first customers. After someone joins the waitlist, ask one last question. Maya asks, “What’s the hardest part of turning over a unit today?” People who make it this far are often the most interested, so their answers can show you which part of the problem they most want solved.

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Build a dashboard to track your results

A dashboard shows the results of your tests in one place so you can more easily compare them to the bar you set. Build a private dashboard page that only you can open. To build a dashboard, send Bolt a prompt like this one, and change the details to match your page:
Your dashboard shows the email addresses of the people on your waitlist. Make sure the dashboard requires you to log in, and check that you can’t open it from a private browser window before you share your page. To learn more, see Security.

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Bring people to your page

When your page and dashboard are ready, publish your page so other people can visit it. Your page needs visitors for your tests to give reliable data. If you don’t get much traffic in the first week, go to the places your audience already spends time. Maya posts in a local Facebook group for property managers and drops off flyers with QR codes at leasing offices.

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Track where your visitors come from

A source link is your page’s URL with a short label at the end that names where you shared it. Create a different source link for each place you share your page. When a visitor opens one of these links, Bolt tracks the source and shows it on your dashboard. Then you can see which places bring the most visitors and signups. To create a link for each place you share your page:
  1. Copy your page’s published URL. For example, https://turnover-ready.bolt.host.
  2. For each place, add ?source= and a short name to the end of the URL. For example:
    • https://turnover-ready.bolt.host/?source=facebook
    • https://turnover-ready.bolt.host/?source=flyer-downtown
    • https://turnover-ready.bolt.host/?source=flyer-eastside
  3. Use the matching link each time you share your page.
If you plan to distribute flyers in more than one place, make a separate source link for each location.

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Make QR codes for printed materials

People can’t click a link on a flyer, so use a QR code that opens the link when someone scans it with a phone camera. Bolt can create QR codes for you. Send a prompt like this one, with your own links:
Before you print, scan each QR code with your phone to make sure it opens your page. Then visit your dashboard to check that the visit shows up with the right source. If your project is on a paid plan, you can also see visits and top traffic sources in hosting analytics. Hosting analytics includes visits from web crawlers and bots, so its numbers can be higher than the number of real people who visited.

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Talk to potential users

Data can only tell you how your page is performing, not why prospective customers behave the way they do. Email your most promising waitlist signups, like the ones who gave the best answers to your qualifying question, and invite them to a short call. Each call you book counts toward your bar. Ask specific questions about things that already happened. Broad or yes/no questions like “Would you use this?” tend to get the same vague compliments you might get from a friend. Maya asks property managers about their last empty unit:
  • How long did it sit empty?
  • How long did it take to get it cleaned?
  • What did the wait cost the owner?
Questions about recent, real events show you what people care about and what they do today to solve the problem. For other businesses, you might ask:
  • Meal-prep subscription: What did you have for dinner last Tuesday? How did you decide?
  • Invoicing app: Tell me about the last invoice that was paid late. What did you do to follow up?

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Decide whether to build

When your test period ends, open your dashboard and compare your results to the bar you set before you launched. Maya’s results after two weeks: Since Maya cleared every part of her bar, she has good evidence to keep pursuing her idea.

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If your results are mixed

You might clear some parts of your bar and miss others. Mixed results give you insight into which parts of your test to change. For example, the meal-prep subscription had these results after two weeks: Plenty of the right people visited and joined the waitlist, so the problem matters to them. But almost nobody clicked a price, and only one person booked a call. People want help with weeknight dinners, but the plans or prices on the page don’t fit them. The measures you miss point to which parts of the test you need to iterate on: Change one thing at a time, then run the test again. If you change your prices and your page at the same time, you can’t tell which change made the difference. For the meal-prep subscription, the next step is to change the plans or prices, then talk to the people who joined the waitlist to find out what would fit them better.

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If you hit your stop rule

Hitting your stop rule is still a valuable result because it saves you from going further with an idea that isn’t working. If you hit your stop rule:
  1. Stop spending time and money on this version of your idea.
  2. Keep everything you gathered, including your waitlist, your dashboard data, and your interview notes.
  3. Decide whether to test a new version of the idea or walk away.
If Maya had hit her stop rule, she’d keep her job, email her signups about what she learned, and test her idea with a different type of customer or a different offer.

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Use the results to choose your next step

Whether you cleared your bar or hit your stop rule, the details in your results can show you where to go next:
  • Price clicks: Five of Maya’s eight price clicks went to the clean with a 24-hour guarantee. That’s a sign that speed matters most to her customers, so it’s a good place to start.
  • Sources: One of Maya’s flyer locations brought in the most visitors. Her first customers might come from that area, so she’ll focus there first.
  • Interview answers: Three of the property managers Maya talked to said finding a cleaner on short notice is the hardest part, so she’ll offer same-week availability first.