35/200 = 17.5% conversion rate; based on this lesson’s benchmark that “a visit-to-signup rate in the 10-20% range is generally considered a strong demand signal” for B2B ideas, this specific result falls within that strong range.

8/500 = 1.6% conversion rate; this falls below the “below 3%” threshold this lesson identifies as signaling weak market fit, suggesting this specific result is a weak demand signal rather than a strong one.

This is a fake-door test; a high click-through rate suggests genuine interest in this specific feature before any actual engineering time has been spent building it, allowing the founder to gather this evidence cheaply before committing development resources to a feature that may or may not turn out to be worth building.

This is a concierge MVP; it specifically tests whether people will actually pay for the underlying outcome or result the eventual software would provide, before any actual software has been built, since the manual delivery behind the scenes is invisible to the customer, who experiences it as if it were a real product.

No, not equally valuable; this lesson specifically notes that “the quality of traffic… matters as much as the raw conversion numbers,” and that a waitlist from targeted outreach to a specifically narrowed buyer persona “means more than a similar-looking waitlist… from broad, viral social media traffic that attracted curious people well outside the actual target buyer group”; even with similar raw sizes, the targeted waitlist likely provides stronger, more relevant evidence.

A fake-door test only requires adding a simple button or link (a very small amount of effort) rather than actually building the full feature it represents; by measuring click-through interest on this minimal, low-cost placeholder first, a founder can gauge likely demand for a specific feature before investing the much larger amount of engineering time actually building it would require, directly serving the broader goal (established across this Part) of avoiding wasted development resources on features or products that don’t have genuine demand.

This can be interpreted as a meaningful positive validation signal; achieving actual paying customers (not just interested or curious people, but people who paid real money) for the underlying service, even though delivered manually rather than through actual software, provides strong evidence that the underlying value proposition has genuine commercial pull, addressing the core question of whether people will actually pay for this outcome before the founder commits to building the full software product.

This result sits right at the boundary between the “below 3%” weak signal threshold and the “10-20%” strong signal range, meaning it doesn’t clearly fall into either the described strong or weak category; this suggests the founder might reasonably view this as an ambiguous, borderline result warranting additional evidence (perhaps combined with other signals mentioned in this lesson, like fake-door test results or concierge MVP outcomes) rather than either a clearly strong or clearly weak result on its own.

Because a landing page signup, even at a strong conversion rate, only demonstrates interest in learning more or being kept informed (a relatively low-commitment action), while a concierge MVP specifically tests whether people will actually pay real money for the underlying outcome, which is a stronger, more direct test of genuine commercial viability; a founder might reasonably want this additional, more rigorous evidence beyond signup interest alone before committing to a full product build.

This test specifically measures interest in this particular feature among people who have already committed to and are already paying for the core product, which is a different question than whether this specific feature would attract new customers who aren’t yet using the product at all; the same fake-door technique can be used to answer different specific validation questions depending on which audience segment it’s shown to, meaning where and to whom a test is deployed affects what specific conclusion can be drawn from its results.

This combination suggests that while there’s genuine interest in the general problem or value proposition (reflected in the strong signup rate), the specific proposed feature tested via the fake door may not be the right specific solution these interested people actually want, meaning the founder might need to investigate further (perhaps through additional customer interviews) what specific feature or approach these interested signups would actually value, rather than assuming the initial proposed feature is automatically the right one just because overall interest in the problem area is strong.

These three methods test progressively deeper levels of commitment and evidence: a landing page test measures interest in learning more (a relatively low bar, but also low-effort to run); a fake-door test measures interest in a specific feature through an actual click on a real product surface; and a concierge MVP measures whether people will actually pay for a manually-delivered outcome, the closest possible proxy to whether they’d pay for the eventual real product; a founder might reasonably use these progressively, starting with the lower-effort landing page test and moving to more rigorous, higher-effort methods like a concierge MVP as initial signals prove promising, rather than needing to run the most effort-intensive test first before any cheaper, faster method has provided initial encouraging evidence.