Want to start a business? Maybe you can start by blogging.

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When you have a great entrepreneurial idea. You're going to start all night and night. Build product prototypes and write code. After a couple of weeks of crazy work, you're looking forward to releasing the product and finding out that nobody cares.

This kind of story believes that many people are not unfamiliar. Most of the time, the product of the entrepreneur does not help people solve the real problem. Thankfully, lean entrepreneurship is a way to help many entrepreneurs find market demand and build a company through constant validation learning. Through constant experimentation, suppose, to discover the real needs of users.

In addition, there is actually a way that is not known to people--blogging. You're right, blogging is really a credible strategy for quickly validating your ideas and collecting market feedback. Some of the more famous startups have used this strategy:

Mattermark

Mattermark is a data analysis software that imports data from Twitter, LinkedIn, AngelList, Crunchbase, and news sites to help investors spot potential opportunities and keep track of the growth of a start-up.

Its founder, Danielle Morrill, made a portfolio index of major incubators and investment companies after the failure of the venture, such as the Alex rankings of YC-hatched companies and the number of Facebook MAU. After writing a number of blogs in succession, it has created a lot of buzz on Twitter and Facebook and has created a large readership. Then she started the road to entrepreneurship, occasion set up a mattermark.

Silencer

Silencer's founder, Zack Shapiro, also wrote a blog when he was working TaskRabbit, "Why is purity" the next opportunity for the Internet (Why muting is the next big era of the Internet) 。 In this article, he talked about how to filter the flood of information, but also introduced a "mute API": Can be based on keywords, tags, activity names, topics such as filtering spam information.

The article got a lot of resonance and then he tried to turn his ideas into reality. In addition to his work, he uses evenings and weekends to develop. Three months later, Zack launched the Chrome plugin silencer, which filters information through keywords and labels. So far, he has developed a plug-in to filter 6000 to 10,000 messages a day, and has been reported by many well-known media.

Groupon

Many people may not yet know that Groupon, the originator of group buying, started out as a blogger. Groupon started out as a WordPress blog, according to Groupon founder Andrew Mason. At that time, they published a daily sale of promotional gifts coupons, concert tickets, movie tickets, and then use some software to make a PDF of the purchase tickets, and sent to the customer by mail.

While this is not necessarily the best solution, blogging does quickly prove that Groupon's business ideas are correct and that the least upfront investment helps the latter to test market demand. "This is enough to prove the idea and it's a product that people really like," Mason recalls. "When they found out about the huge demand for this coupon, Groupon immediately expanded its size and developed so fast."

App.net

Twitter announced some of its policy changes in June 2012: It will restrict access to Third-party interfaces. This directly causes several companies that depend on this interface to shut down successively. Shortly after the announcement, Dalton Caldwell expressed distaste for Twitter's approach to restricting API access and focusing on advertising profitability. And his words caused the majority of netizens resonance. The amount of browsing in this post is more than 80,000 times in just two weeks. People yearn for an open API that does not rely on advertising and can replace Twitter.

And the truth is, his idea is not to say it casually. Dalton and his team have been trying to roll back the app.net for the past 8 months. However, Dalton found that he did not use the introduction of specific products, but directly through the blog can verify market demand and promote new products. Even when the product has not been released, his readers have provided him with relevant feedback.

After Dalton began blogging, App.net had raised more than 800,000 dollars from 18,000 supporters in just six weeks.

Ghost

Ghost is a new blogging platform that has received a lot of attention in the open source community since April 2013, when Kickstarter launched the platform.

In fact, five months before the launch of the project, Ghost founder John O ' Nolan has already mentioned it in his blog. O ' Nolan initially created a concept page describing its own blog solution. In the concept page, he mentions that WordPress has become a content management system, WordPress has assumed more complex role, it is no longer the original Simple blog tool, become bloated and complex. and Ghost mainly to "simplify" as the goal, with ease of use as the core redefine the blog platform.

In just a few days after the concept page was launched, O ' Nolan said there had been more than 90,000 visits. In addition, he received effective feedback from hundreds of supporters and commentators. O ' Nolan has already received a great deal of valuable data from the community as others struggle to find customers and collect feedback.

Now, Ghost supporters are looking forward to the launch of the blog platform. Ghost's trailer site has more than 200,000 views per month. At the same time, John already has 5,236 users who are willing to pay, and 19,000 e-mail subscriptions, which are also being refreshed at the rate of 2,500 new subscriptions per week. And it all started with a blog.

What's the benefit of blogging first?

Blogging allows entrepreneurs to:

The lowest cost of verifying their own ideas

Confirm Target User

Build a mass base

Collect feedback from early users

Although there may be more ways to collect user feedback and verify your ideas, before writing the code, the entrepreneur may want to write a blog to share their views, and perhaps get some surprises.