How to Gauge Early Interest Before Building an MVP

MVPs cost time. What if you could gauge interest with 2 hours of work? DemandSonar's "Pre-MVP Interest Detector" uses 7 non-intrusive proxies to estimate future engagement. The proxies:

• Question density on Q&A sites (Quora, Stack Exchange)
• Newsletter signup velocity in adjacent niches
• "Notify me" button clicks on competitor's coming-soon pages
• Social bookmarking saves (Pinterest, Reddit)
• Job postings in the problem space (enterprises betting on it)
• Patent filing trends (lagging indicator but useful)
• GitHub repo stars for open-source alternatives Each proxy contributes to an Early Interest Score (0-100). Scores above 55 suggest that if you built a lightweight MVP, you'd have a ready audience. we've tracked many startups that used this score to decide when to build. Those that waited until the score crossed 60 had a 40% higher 6-month retention rate. Don't build into silence. Listen for the hum first. [Check your Early Interest Score →]