When I advise early-stage subscription SaaS founders, one question comes up more than any other: How can I know if my product truly fits the market before I scale to 1,000 users? Getting that answer cheaply and quickly is the difference between a company that iterates into product-market fit (PMF) and one that burns through runway chasing vanity metrics. Over the years I’ve helped founders run experiments that reveal real demand without expensive builds or huge ad spends. Below I share three low-cost experiments I use and recommend — practical, repeatable, and focused on learning the right things early.
Pre-sales landing page with a payment or waitlist trigger
I’ve seen founders validate demand by selling something that doesn’t yet exist. That sounds risky, but when done ethically and transparently, it’s a powerful way to measure willingness to pay. The core idea: build a focused landing page for a specific persona and value proposition, and give visitors one of two clear actions — pay to join early access or sign up to get notified when you launch.
How I run it:
Why this works: a paid commitment, even small, separates curious browsers from customers who are willing to put money down. If you consistently convert 3–8% of qualified visitors into paying customers on a pre-sale, you’ve got a strong signal that PMF is possible. If conversion is near zero, you either have a messaging problem or a feature mismatch — both equally valuable insights.
Concierge MVP or manual onboarding loop
Before building a full product, I sometimes offer a high-touch, manually-delivered version of the service. This is my favorite experiment to learn what customers actually want and what they’ll pay for. Instead of coding automation upfront, you perform the service yourself or with a small team, documenting every step.
How I run it:
Why this works: Concierge MVPs reveal the true operational complexity and the parts of your product customers value most. I once worked with a founder who thought the dashboard would be the main value; after a month of manual delivery, customers valued the weekly interpretation calls more than the dashboard. That pivot saved months of development and led to a pricing model focused on consulting + software.
Targeted outreach + one-to-one sales conversations
If you’re building a B2B subscription product, there’s no substitute for direct conversations with decision-makers. This is a low-cost, high-information experiment: pick a well-defined segment and run a short campaign of personalized outreach to book discovery calls. The goal is not to sell immediately but to learn about pain, buying process, budget, and competition.
How I run it:
Why this works: direct conversations reduce guesswork. You learn if the buyer is the user, the buyer’s pain threshold, and the procurement timeline. Anecdotes from these calls also feed landing page copy and pricing strategy. In one case a founder discovered procurement required an annual contract with legal review; that single insight changed their pricing and go-to-market approach and prevented costly churn later.
Comparative snapshot: cost, time, and core metric
| Experiment | Typical Cost | Time to Learn | Core Metric |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-sales landing + payment | $200–$800 | 2–6 weeks | Paid conversion rate |
| Concierge MVP | $0–$2,000 (time costs) | 4–12 weeks | Retention & willingness to pay |
| Targeted outreach & calls | $100–$500 | 3–8 weeks | Qualified opportunity rate |
How to combine these experiments for maximum insight
I rarely recommend doing just one experiment in isolation. Combine them. Start with a landing page to validate messaging and willingness to pay. Use responses to recruit customers for a concierge MVP to learn the product’s must-have features and delivery model. Parallelly run targeted outreach to validate your ICP and sales motion. The insights from each feed the others — landing page copy improves with anecdotes from sales calls; concierge learnings refine the pricing model for the pre-sale.
One practical tip: always measure the right things. For early PMF, focus on paying customers, retention after first month, and qualitative feedback about outcomes. Vanity metrics like raw sign-ups, pageviews, and demo bookings are useful signals, but they don’t prove PMF.
If you’re ready to try one of these experiments and want help drafting a landing page, outreach sequence, or concierge workflow, I’m happy to walk through it with you. These low-cost approaches have helped me and the founders I mentor avoid costly mistakes and build businesses that customers actually want to pay for.