I speak to a lot to startup founders, and there are some phrases that ring an alarm bell: 

• “We’ve got a great app, but people aren’t paying.”
• “We invested hundreds of hours building [insert feature], but it’s not getting the response we expected.”
• “We’re running out of runway, the next feature we build needs to be the right one.”

No one likes the feeling of having put blood, sweat, and tears into building an incredible app — only to have people not react the way they’d hoped. That path leads to building out of fear and urgency, rather than momentum and demand.

The solution? Surprisingly simple, but surprisingly rare: test willingness to pay before you write a single line of code. Focus on early validation, so you’re not just hearing that people ‘love’ your app or feature, but they’re actually ready to pay for it. 

That is what I’d tell those startups, had I met them on time.

But will people pay for something they’ve never seen before?

The short (and slightly Dutch-direct) answer is yes. A notable example is The Pump, a fitness app co-founded by Arnold Schwarzenegger, which generated half a million dollars in pre-launch revenue. They validated demand by leveraging their Pump Club newsletter, proving that people valued workout content directly from Arnold and would pay for access to an app built around him.

Okay, great, for Arnie, but most of us don’t have a bodybuilding legend in our corner. So let’s look at someone very different: a school teacher.

Eric Duffett spent a few months on Udemy and an app development course to learn the basics of building apps. After experimenting and learning from early successes and failures, he created Shot Pattern, a golf app, with zero existing audience. Instead of waiting for launch, he started sharing screenshots of early designs on Twitter. Each post brought in new sign-ups, and interest spiked when he previewed a data-driven ‘expected value’ tool he was building.

The result? A steady stream of feedback that shaped Eric’s setup, so much so that his trial-to-paid conversion rates came in well above industry averages during those early days.

The lesson: you don’t need a massive audience to pre-validate. Traction often comes from solving a real pain point. I’m seeing this firsthand with a startup I’m currently working on. We’re offering a longer free trial in exchange for feedback, and people aren’t just signing up—they’re writing detailed motivations about why they want in, what they’re looking for, and even sharing the trial with others. The initial traction came from a small Meta ads budget, but the results showed up in the form of an engaged community behind the idea.

But here’s the real validation test: when launch day comes, will they actually pay?

This is why we test demand.

Common pitfalls when testing demand

Before we get into tactics, let’s cover some of the common risks when validating your app:

1. ‘Sure, I’d pay that’ is an unintentional lie

The book The Mom Test became popular for a reason: your mom (and friends, and basically anyone who wants to be nice) won’t give you hard truths. Even strangers can fall into the same trap — people like to please. 

If I think about all the things I’ve said I’d be willing to pay for or want to buy, I’d be very broke if I actually put my money where my mouth is. (Thankfully, I’m all talk and strangely frugal when it comes to buying things for myself — or paying for parking.)

To sum up, we need to be conscious of our techniques. Choose methods that push people as close as possible to an actual purchase. Most suggestions in this blog are designed to do exactly that: increasing the level of commitment step by step as they progress through the app. But honest signals are only half the battle. 

2. Testing with an irrelevant audience

The wrong targeting plus false compliments is a deadly combination. Go too broad, and you’ll get a mix of love/hate feedback that leaves you spinning.

When I see an app with wildly contradicting signals from a tiny audience, that usually tells me something else: the app isn’t clear yet on who their true customer is.

You should be narrowing in on an audience where:

• You can effectively solve their problem
• You can stand out from the crowd
• They’re willing to pay for that solution

3. Clicks ≠ sales

Clicks might feel like progress, but they aren’t the same as paying customers (same for email sign-ups, sadly). Interest and commitment are not equal. I said I’d buy all those things, but when push came to shove and they asked for my credit card details, my frugal side prevailed. 

I’ve seen founders get hyped about big pre-launch email lists, only to watch 2% convert. Painful.

That said, once customers are paying for your app, clicks become meaningful as they can signal which features they value most.

4. Messaging matters

All of these techniques ask people to buy something that doesn’t fully exist yet. That’s a big ask. So your messaging has to work extra hard. Make sure you:

• Stay clear: No confusion about what you’re offering
• Build excitement: Help people see the vision
• Build trust: Show you’re real and will deliver
• Create urgency: Give them a reason to act now

I say messaging matters because it won’t just come down to your words, but also how you convey them. The images and videos you use to bring them to life can make the difference between “Yeah, sounds nice” and “Take my money now!”.

Key models for testing real demand

There are multiple ways to test and validate demand even before you’ve built a product. And if you’ve already been building for a while before stumbling across this article, don’t worry. These techniques are organized by phase, so you can plug in wherever you are.

The rule of thumb: the further along you are in building, the later the technique you’ll use. And the later the technique, the stronger the validation.

Phase one: Discovery techniques (learning what problems matter)

Phase one starts with discovery techniques. These don’t involve customers paying yet, but they force you to deeply understand what people have paid for before, and what they’re already saying in an unbiased way. I’ve kept them in because without this foundation, it’s hard to run effective phase two tests.

1. Spend time in relevant communities

In early days, one of the best ways to understand demand is hanging out where your target audience already spends time. People won’t be shouting, “I wish there was an app for XYZ”, but they will be asking questions, venting frustrations, and sharing problems.

This is exactly what Eric Duffett did. Believe it or not, there’s a whole Twitter community for golfers. Eric used this community to learn from real golfers and even to validate early features and ideas.

Communities are great for surfacing pain points. But they won’t always tell you what people actually want in a solution. Once you’ve got a general direction of the problem, it’s time to….

2. Talk to real users

Gosh, how people shy away from this. Customer interviews are where so many founders hesitate, but they’re essential.

Compare Eric’s journey: with Shot Pattern, he quickly learned from his audience in month one. However, with his first app — essentially ‘meditation for golf’ — he spent years developing, recording content, and even contacting over 300 instructors. After five years of redesigns, he discovered (too late) that golfers didn’t actually want what he was offering.

Interviews aren’t about asking, “Would you like this?” (people will just say yes to be nice). Instead, try running jobs-to-be-done research and digging into:

• What’s the real problem they’re facing?
• How have they tried solving it before?
• What did they like/dislike about existing solutions?
• What have they already spent to solve this problem?

Because here’s the truth: past spending is a much better predictor of future spending than empty promises.

Market research is also essential for validating and identifying your unique value proposition, plus it can help determine initial pricing through pricing research techniques and asking the right questions. 

Phase two: Transactional validation (testing willingness to pay)

3. Fake door testing (aka painted door landing pages)

At this stage, you might have no app — just a dream and a pay button. Except…it’s not real. When someone clicks, you tell them it isn’t ready yet and invite them to sign up for early access or an exclusive offer.

A little bit cheeky, but it gets you as close as possible to willingness-to-pay, before your app is ready. Many founders run fake door testing with small Meta ad campaigns — not for scale, but to see how a cold audience reacts. You can test different concepts, messages, and prices, while also building an initial list of engaged prospects for future feedback. Meta is great for running quick tests and experiments to validate different creatives, audiences and more. Once you’ve narrowed down your concept, you can proceed to accepting real payments.

Now, remember what I said: clicks still aren’t the same as payments. But they’re a stronger signal than vague interest. People thought they were about to buy — and that’s a lot closer to reality. Just remember: this method will still overestimate actual conversion rates, because no one’s entered a real payment form yet. You haven’t put a ring on it (or in this case, you haven’t got their credit card information).

4. Paid waitlist or founder’s offers

The previous waiting list is free to join, but as you start to validate your concept and prototype it, you may want to switch to a paid validation. We all know how many people drop off at the final step. I’ve seen this firsthand: a waitlist of ~500 people who said they’d buy the minute we launched… only to turn into ~60 actual purchases. Interest fades, life moves on, and hype alone won’t pay your bills.

That’s why, once you’ve nailed down your concept and are working on a prototype, it’s worth moving to a ‘buy now, get access later’ model. Yes, it can feel scary to charge before launch — what if you pivot, or people get upset if the offer shifts? A simple way to de-risk this is to offer refundable pre-orders. Customers still show strong intent, but you give them peace of mind.

A great example: Gabriel Wyner’s Fluent Forever app. Through Kickstarter, he raised over $500k in pre-launch support. His tiers made it easy to accommodate different levels of commitment: $5 provided updates and input on features, while the most popular tier—  Early-Intermediate Speaker at $40 — offered beta access, a month’s full subscription, a training guide, and a discount on a lifetime plan. Over 1,500 backers chose that tier alone (a startup’s dream).

It’s tempting to skip straight to validation that hands the money to you, but looking at Gabriel Wyner’s Fluent Forever Kickstarter shows why depth matters. He didn’t just toss up a pay button, he created trust and excitement with:

1. A video walking through the product
2. Established authority as a language-learning expert
3. A five-minute walkthrough of the concept, prototype screens, methodology, and proof
4. Reward tiers that added value beyond just the app
5. Transparent pricing and a clear roadmap of what features would unlock at different funding levels

You don’t need all of that, but the depth of content clearly helped him validate more effectively.

That said, notice what the landing page revealed: “If we meet our minimum funding goals, we’ll start by creating a beta version of our app for Spanish (Latin America)… ready by April 2018.” Translation: they hadn’t built anything yet. Validation came first.

One final note — urgency drives action. Limited early-bird pricing, capped subscription slots, or time-sensitive deals all give people a reason to commit now, not later.

 5. Pre‑sell subscriptions / MVP access via web

At this stage, you’re closer to launch. You’ve validated demand in phase one, tested willingness to pay in phase two, and now you can move to actually pre-selling subscriptions.

If you already have a warm email list or community, this can be the fastest validation method. You can run the entire pre-sale through email before even publishing a public landing page.

For this stage, you don’t have to have a full existing app or even a subscription to begin with. Headspace famously started with in-person meditation sessions. Only after those kept selling out did they expand into an app.

With preselling, the web is your friend:

• It avoids the friction of app downloads
• You can run a simple landing page + Stripe checkout
• With RevenueCat redemption links, users who pre-pay can unlock premium content once the app goes live

The extra benefit of this is that implementing a web pre-sale allows you to keep the 15-30% Apple would take, which makes a huge difference in those early days. And at this point, the positioning is clear: early access to an app that’s about to ship.

💡 Pro tip: Check out our full breakdown on how to pre-sell subscriptions on the web to guide you through the process.

5 Models for testing customer demand and validating your app

Now we’ve walked through five core validation techniques, here’s a quick comparison to help you decide which approach fits your stage, budget, and risk tolerance.

Technique	Phase	Set-up time	Cost	Signal strength	Best for	Risk level
Communities	Discovery	Low	Low	Low	Identifying pain points	Very low
Talking to users	Discovery	Low–med	Low	Low–med	Validating problems & past spend	Very low
Fake door test	Transactional	Medium	Low–med	Medium	Testing positioning & pricing	Low
Paid waitlist or founders’ offer	Transactional	Med–high	Low–med	High	Proving intent to pay	Medium
Pre-sell subscriptions / MVP access	Transactional	High	Medium	Very high	Launch-ready or near-launch apps	Med–high

A step-by-step framework to run a demand test

There are five steps to setting up a demand test for success:

1. Define your success metric and what you want to learn
2. Identify who to reach and how
3. Set up the experiment
4. Implement the validation technique
5. Reflect and iterate

Let’s walk through them step by step. 

Step 1: Define your success metric and what you want to learn

Decide what you want to learn from the test. This will help you define the right metric to focus on. For example:

• Number of people interested → signups
• Percentage of people who actually pay → conversion rate
• Who will stick around → retention metric

Use benchmarks where available as a starting point, like the RevenueCat State of Subscription Apps Report 2025, but please adjust them to be more realistic for this initial phase. It’s unlikely you’re going to hit scalable metrics at this stage; you’re looking for signals that your app is on the right track. 

Write down all your assumptions and the potential risks — this helps you measure which beliefs hold true after the test, and design your experiment in the best possible way. 

For example, imagine you’re building a credit score tracking app, and your assumption is that your audience is more likely to be people improving their credit score to get a mortgage, rather than someone trying to get a loan. If this is an assumption you want to validate during demand testing, you should design your experiment to validate it, for example, by testing several ads per audience to compare performance.

Step 2: Identify who to reach and how

Now it’s time to clarify your target users: who is most likely to pay for your product? You may have set customer profiles in mind, or want to define some personas as part of your research. 

Once you have a clear idea of who your target users are, you need to actually reach them. Some good ways are:

• Communities (forums, social media groups, Discord servers, etc.)
• Email lists
• Paid ads and organic social media
• Influencers or sponsorships

Don’t worry if your audience is small, there are multiple ways to reach relevant users.

Step 3: Set up the experiment

For early discovery (techniques one–two), this means defining what you want to learn.

For transactional tests (techniques three–five), this often involves building a landing page. Key elements:

• Clear value proposition
• Visuals to explain the offering
• Social proof/trust signals
• Urgency triggers (limited-time offers, early-bird pricing)
• Strong call-to-action (CTA)
• Optional ‘more info’ sections to dive deeper

Don’t just set up conversion tracking for the page, you should also track user interaction, e.g. clicks on specific sections, to understand interest — even if users don’t convert immediately.

Step 4: Implement the validation technique

After discovery, you want to move quickly to techniques that involve real transactions (four–five).

Set up payment options via web to capture more insights and reduce friction: Stripe, Paddle, or RevenueCat redemption links all work. Web pre-sales also avoid app-store fees and give flexibility in testing offers and messaging.

Step 5: Reflect and iterate

You’ve launched! Take a moment to be pleased with yourself, then dig into the data.

Expect some tests to fail — it’s part of learning pricing, positioning, and offering. You can gain as much from an experiment that went badly as a successful one. 

Analyze your results:

• Did users fail to pay because they weren’t convinced, or was the offer misaligned?
• Which sections of your page drew attention? What did users care most about?

Conduct further user tests for qualitative feedback to improve messaging, visuals, and overall experience. Then, adjust your concept, page, and offering based on what you learn. Then, of course, re-test. And repeat the process 🔄

People are willing to pay, now what?

This is only the start of your research journey. At first, you’re progressing through validation techniques, but once you’ve got those initial buyers, there’s still so much more to learn. 

Ask ‘who are they and what triggered their interest?’. Understanding this can help you initially optimize the landing page and identify areas for further refining, which in turn informs your experiment backlog. For example, do you need to focus more on pricing tiers or communication?

From there, you can ask for feedback on your product and gather testimonials to build trust with your audience. Having a close bond with initial customers is invaluable, so don’t take their time for granted. Some will just love being part of something new and exciting, while others will appreciate the VIP experience you give them.

Just as clicks don’t equal willingness to pay, willingness to pay doesn’t mean retention. Monitor these initial cohorts closely to determine who stays and who doesn’t. Why do they leave? 

You can learn so much from these strategic tests, and as we’ve seen Arnie and Eric’s case studies, the right buzz and interest can set your app up for long-term success.