There are tools available now that make it incredibly easy to launch a simple website and validate willingness to pay.

First, get a simple site up and running. If you're technical, you can choose to design and code this yourself, but most users will be better off using a template site builder.

A single page site should be more than enough for validation, especially for your very first step. But if you want to gradually iterate and add more pages and content to increase fidelity and gather more learnings, that's an option too.

Some good options for building your validation site are:

• Squarespace for great-looking websites.
• Webflow gives lots of custom control over your design and is good for single page sites.
• QuickMVP is a helpful little suite of tools for creating landing pages to validate ideas and products. It simplifies both the landing page creation process and also setting up adverts and gathering statistics. If you're a non-technical user this is a good solution.

There are a few elements which you'll definitely want to include on your simple website:

• Explain what your product does, clearly and concisely.
• Highlight your product's unique selling points.
• Address any key concerns that users had during testing. If they were worried about security, performance or comfort, explain your solutions for this.
• Add a direct 'call to action' to bring users to the checkout and payment part of the website. This should be clear and unequivocal--something like "Buy now for $99".
• Make sure your payment page has an email collection form so that you can gather emails from prospective customers. MailChimp is a good option here.
• Instead of confirming the user's order, you should show them a "Sorry" page which explains why you're conducting the experiment. This way, you make sure they don't have false expectations about receiving the product.
• Make sure you have analytics running on the site so you can track how people are interacting with it. Google Analytics is simple and free.

Once you have the validation site up and running, you need to drive traffic to it. You do need to be a little bit cautious about doing this within your network of friends and family though. You don't want to fall into the same trap of collecting 'false positives' who sign up just because they know you personally.

The best technique we've found for bringing unbiased traffic to validation sites is to fork out a little money for Facebook Ads or a simple Google Adwords campaign .

You'll probably need to spend between $100 to $500 on ads to bring enough users to your page for validation. This can seem like an expensive overhead to the testing process, which is why we leave this validation stage till the very end. Think of it this way: $100-500 is a far safer and less risky overhead than spending thousands of dollars building the actual product. Plus, if the product idea is strong, this money isn't wasted. You'll be building up a great list of interested users who will be likely to sign up for your product when it actually launches.

Facebook and Google AdWords have robust targeting possibilities that let you showcase your solution to the right audience, which you would have identified in the "Validate the Problem" phase. You can also further optimize your ad by factoring in data from your initial ads, such as number of clicks, likes and shares received and the location of people engaging with it. Getting started with an ad campaign on Facebook or Google AdWords is pretty straightforward. We won't cover the steps for setting that up here, but some Googling should get you on your way to quickly creating an ad campaign.

We'd recommend keeping a close eye on a few metrics:

• Conversion rate: how many visitors ended up attempting to buy the product.
• Total 'sales': it's interesting to learn where these sales came from (geographically).
• Cart abandonment rate: in a real online store, this is typically between 60-80% ( 68% is the average). This means that almost 7 of the 10 people entering the checkout process didn't end up completing it.

To go deeper, we might also suggest:

• A/B testing: experimenting with different headlines and content to see how it affects conversions. However, this only works if you're driving thousands of visitors to the website in order to get statistical significance to your findings.
• Speaking to your customers: once you've gathered someone's email address, you'll be able to send messages and newsletters to them and explain how your product is evolving. But you can also reach out to them directly and ask them a few questions to help understand their needs and motivations. This can be a great way to learn more from your potential users.