Hello, Aron here.

Quick recap if you missed the last newsletter:
We met Marcus (23) and David (46), two fictional founders, both with the same idea: a marketplace for buying and selling small websites. Each hit a wall on day two as they both realized they need to solve the problem of proving a listing’s analytics are accurate. Someone also suggested to Marcus (on Reddit) he should find a way to expand the buyer base beyond his own marketplace.

Read about their first two days here: Two startup founders validating their ideas

Their goal is to make real progress at the end of one week.
We voted, and here is who you think will make the most progress:

Who did you think will get further by Friday?

🟦🟦🟦🟦🟦🟦🟦 Marcus 70%
🟫🟫 David 26%
⬜ Neither 4%

Let’s see how the next two days of the week go for each entrepreneur.

Wednesday: Marcus

Marcus posts an honest follow-up in r/SideProject:

"Hearing the same thing from everyone. Trust is the real problem here, not the listing itself. How would you actually solve this?"

The replies start coming in, and one really resonates. A regular in the community writes:

Marcus is stunned.
It's obvious in hindsight. A small embeddable widget. Three lines of code, drop it on your site, it displays live analytics and the moment you flag it as "for sale," it automatically populates the marketplace with verified numbers. And it solves his distribution problem by publicly placing a “this website is for sale” widget on the asset in question. Any inquiry routes straight to a broker on staff to handle the actual deal.

By that night he's rewritten his landing page copy around this new concept and posted the idea back to the same thread:

"Building this now. A widget, not just a listing form..." 

60+ upvotes. People start asking when they can install it. They love the idea of their own customers being added to the buyer pool, and they love the analytics transparency.

Wednesday: David

David spends Wednesday working through TAM, SAM, and SOM slides, using the framework his old team used for much larger deals. He estimates the addressable market at $500M+ based on a couple of industry reports. The competitive landscape seems weak. This is an opportunity.

He texts Priya again about finding someone who's actually bought a small site. She says she's been swamped but will try. He puts out messages to other corporate contacts of his, hunting for someone more familiar with this space.

He adds a slide titled Why Now, citing macro trends in remote work and side hustle growth. The deck is now 20 pages of super detailed plans and information. He projects 3 and 5-year revenue numbers. The numbers look good. This could be bigger than he thought, actually.

David is excited. This could really disrupt the market and become a cash cow. He starts researching pay per click rates as well as keywords for ranking on Google. He comes up with a good plan… once live, he will blog about his experience in the M&A market. He has a list of 25 key phrases that he believes he can quickly rank for. Low competition, high search volume according to Google’s Keyword Planner. He estimates he could pull in 2000 visitors per month just from his SEO rankings alone.

Thursday

Marcus spends the day sketching out exactly how the widget would work technically, with two people from the Reddit thread offering to be the first to install it once it's live. He still hasn't built any software, it's a plan and a mockup, but the direction has completely shifted based on something he never would have thought of alone.

David finishes the deck. Priya hasn't found anyone for him to talk to yet. He schedules a "soft launch" call with her boss for two weeks out, pending her availability. He is excited that Priya is connecting him to someone super high up at Salesforce. This could be a good partnership, if they like what they hear. He can’t wait for the two weeks to be up. He’s wondering what he should actually do in the meantime. His plan is ready to launch.

VOTE!
What should David do next?

Next time, we’ll find out how the week ended for both entrepreneurs.

Take care, have a great weekend.

Aron Meystedt
Chief Data Nerd - ValidatorAI

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