How do you validate a new idea?
Before you begin to develop a new product, what is the best way to receive feedback and get validation that people would be interested in the idea?
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Every comment here suggests what to do but nobody suggested how to really validate.
Set up some benchmark for validation and check the result = validation.
You can do whatever you want but the key point is to set up some benchmark to know when exactly your idea can be considered worthy to start working on.
For example:
Without such benchmarks and analyzing results nothing can be considered as a validation.
G'luck!
Great feedback, thanks!
What would you do to push traffic to the landing page? Any suggestions?
It depends on your product and the customers (general public, tech, business, etc.) What is your product and your target customers?
I usually post on betalist and create posts in the relevant communities like IH, reddit, and others.
Here are 3 examples of possible validation with pocket money -> Validate your idea with pocket money You can copy paste the process.
I even wrote another blog How I got 400 signups with the product which didn't exist where I validated idea with just video.
This is a great question @tyler_johnson. I would say to speak with as many people as possible.
You have your hypothesis for your new idea. You need to validate it with people who are actually experiencing the problem you are solving. Getting feedback in the form of customer interviews is important for a number of reasons.
Your idea may not be solving the actual problem your 'ideal customer' has. You can only find this out by interviewing users and understanding the problem from their perspective.
There is no point in building a product that people don't want or that doesn't solve their specific problem(I have learned this the hard way a few times).
Sure, you can build an MVP, but there is no point in putting in serious work on building a product or service until you begin your feedback cycle and user customer input to iterate and refine your offering.
This is what I am trying to do with Startup Sanctuary at the moment. I am putting a focus on building community, gathering feedback from customer interviews and refining my offering as I go.
Hope this helps my man!
To really reach validation and certainly know it, is when you have 10 paying customers (it can be more or less but 10 is good initial indication of validation) even though your product might be lacking so features. And try to work with these first customers to build and improve your product and grow it organically creating a sustainable product.
I didn't mention a certain way because there are so many ways to achieve this goal, so you pick any way you think might work and work from there. If it doesn't work, try other methods that people are talking about to reach this end goal of reaching those 10 paid customers.
And wish you all the best!
Thank you for the comment!
Curious though, I haven't begun development on the product. I wanted feedback to validate the idea and see if there is a need.
Any recommendations?
The general advise is to figure out who your target customers are and speak to them (e.g. If your target is HR department, you can find them in LinkedIn or any other community where they might be active in).
And to just put it out there, anyone might be interested in your product, but they are really interested and it's a real pain for them only when they pay (not when they promise they will pay when you create it, because that just says that it's not a real pain).
My bias advise, is you need to have something to show these target audience, but many times that's not easy and it will take time to reach that (this is instead of doing the feedback stage without anything to show, where you have the MVP and you're getting their feedback at the same time).
In B2B (in my experience) it's a challenge to get a decent-sized company who doesn't already know and trust you to prepay for a product that doesn't exist when you're a new company with no brand and no reputation. That can differ if you personally as a founder have lots of prior industry experience / credibility or if you're selling to people with whom you already have an existing relationship.
A decent alternative to validate genuine interest if you're selling B2B to larger companies is to get them to sign a written letter of intent -- these usually have no true monetary value and are not contractually binding, but in a larger company LOIs usually need some level of legal review / managerial approval to be signed, so it's a good sign besides payment that the prospect is serious.
If you're B2B, one other important thing to validate besides whether someone wants what you plan to make is what the sales process will need to look like when you're ready to actually make sales.
Who is your end user who cares about your problem?
Do they hold the budget or is it someone else?
What does the person who holds the budget think about your problem? Are they already allocating money to solve that problem some other way? If you're solving a problem that currently has no budget allocated to solving it, getting them to pay later is a much bigger risk, and you'll want to try to talk to the budget holder to validate whether they could be convinced to care about the problem enough to open their pocket book.
I appreciate the advice!
I just noticed that you have a landing page. Since you have it, to reach those 10 customers you can add a payment page (but you will need to mention when the product will be ready).
And you're welcome, glad to be of help!
FWIW - a friend and I just wrestled with this same problem and then productized our decisionmaking/validation process, in the form of a few helpful frameworks.
https://idea2mvp.carrd.co/
They're designed to help you get from idea to MVP faster and get unstuck if you're getting analysis paralysis around multiple ideas. Hope they help!
Look at how people are solving the problem now. Are they satisfied with their current solution or are they still looking for better approaches / methods / tools?
At first, I should focus on the problem that product solves. Who is in trouble with this problem? If at least %50 percent of people who are in trouble with the problem like my solution, there is hope.
The point is the problem.
Looking at your product, the biggest most urgent question I had was: who is your ideal target customer going to be?
"Software to help you make business decisions" is so general that literally everyone could theoretically use it. But a market of "everyone" is a terrible way to go to market.
Most people are unlikely to care so much about their decision making process that they'll buy software to help them make decisions. That means you need to come up with a hypothesis of who might be so desperate to make better, more objective decisions that they'll buy your half-baked v1 product.
Do you have a particular job title / industry in mind of who this is going to be for and why they specifically need it? The less general that answer is the easier it will be for you to go to market and communicate why they should spend money on this.
Great advice, I definitely need to get more concise on my ideal customer and focus more on the problem. Thank you!
Tell everyone that the service is going to be released in 1 month etc.
Share that link everywhere and see how many people sign up. Talk to those people and ask if they will pay for this service.
Where do you recommend sharing the link?
Here on IH, dribble, ProductHunt, play.pioneer , slack communities, discord communities, and the list goes on.
I fully disagree.
I put my https://validator.phalox.be landing page online last week, shared it on indiehackers (barely any visits), hackernews (much more interaction), and my visits spiked and dropped again without conversions.
The majority of early stage landing pages are not ready for a big audience. You're much better of trying to reach individuals by going where they are, or by asking your personal contacts (especially in B2B go through your linkedin list). Thinking that your first 'validation experiment' is about selling your product is utopia (it happens sometimes...).
Usually it's hard work and requires talking to many people (read this super interesting article: https://www.lennyrachitsky.com/p/how-the-biggest-consumer-apps-got). You should assume that what you have in mind right now is completely wrong and that you'll need to figure out what is true.
Others mentioned this too, but your decisiondonkey webpage is missing the positioning ('every business' is a very bad niche to start with), lacks a problem statement that you will solve and is quite vague in its solution.
Looking at your other posts on IH, I recommend you to go back to step 1 (in my methodology at Validat.r that would be 'Customer') and choose yourself a very specific niche. Even 'agile teams' is too big of a niche. Combine Agile teams and a department (HR?) and suddenly you can start talking. Maybe you'll figure out that hiring will require a light weight collaborative decision tool?
If you're interested, I'm looking for alpha testers for Validat.r
A few things you can try:
1.) Ask people that you think might be interested. If they're willing, spend some time on a call with them and ask about their problems.
2.) Put up a landing page with an email signup, description of the product, and some info about the features you plan to build. Start writing content around that problem and see if anyone signs up.
3.) Just doing it. There's no bulletproof way to validate an idea. Sometimes you just need to make a calculated bet and try.
Is there anything you've tried so far?
Thanks for the response and info!
I have put together a quick landing page to capture email sign-ups and briefly explain the product idea but still trying to figure out the best way to drive traffic to it.
We recently created a Twitter account, but haven't been very active on that - we need to post more on that.
Here is the landing page: www.decisiondonkey.com
Cool, just signed up :) Sounds like an interesting idea!
Awesome, thank you!
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