How to validate a product idea?
Hey people, I am working on a real estate lead generation app for only sellers lead. What is the best possible way to validate this idea?
Hey people, I am working on a real estate lead generation app for only sellers lead. What is the best possible way to validate this idea?
You definitely need to get into groups and communities like where your target market is spending time online.
Just make sure you're providing as much value as possible to the conversation. Lurk there with intent, listen much more than you talk and when you do talk, be thorough, educate before you sell and respond to people's questions instead of trying to take the conversation in a totally different direction.
If I was you I would forget the idea for a few days. Listen to what people need and then tailor you 'idea' towards what's missing from the current market. This is always the major danger of leading with an 'idea' as opposed to a problem that's felt in a market. Instead of asking yourself how you can be different from them, listen to what the market is missing (that your competitors aren't offering) and create that.
Above all else, remove ALL assumptions.
Perhaps get a landing page up and cold contact a handful of people to see what the response is.
Here's a blog post that will help you - https://josephpacks.com/should-you-build-a-landing-page-before-your-product-is-ready-28971eff68e
Good luck and if you need any help at all, please feel free to email me joe@josephpacks.com (totally free advice of course)
Awesome feedback! thank you @Joseph Pack! I did build a landing page. http://www.zambara.io/ I will be more than happy if you can give me a feedback on the landing page. More than happy to chat over o coffee too. you can reach me at murat.dbc@gmail.com
Everything that Joseph said is spot on. Forget the idea / solution and focus on problem. And just listen to your potential customer segment speak about the problem. Meeting in person is the best - skype / phone calls the second best - emails the third best.
Also, do not leave your email asking anyone to contact you to provide you feedback. Unless they need something from you, you'll realize that they'll not contact you. If you need specific help from anyone, email / tweet / message them to find a time that works for them with a line or two to give context of what you want to talk. You may have to send reminder requests. You may have to find a friend's friend who can provide you with advice / feedback you need.
HTH.
Get out there and talk to target customers! Build a mockup in Invision or another mockup tool and put in front of people who are experiencing the problem your product attempts to solve. Listen to what they have to say and how they interact with the prototype. Talking to Humans, by Giff Constable is a great book for learning more about idea validation. It's a quick read with a lot of useful tips for getting started. Since you are interested in real estate lead generation, you might start by talking to realtors about the pain points they experience with current software offerings or other methods of seller lead generation currently, you can use their feedback to understand what they needs are and how to design or modify your design in order to meet their needs.
What we actually did with meetemu.com — simple app for exchanging contact information, an alternative to business cards — is we launched the landing page before we started building the product. And it helped us a lot!
The feedback we gathered from the visitors is worth more than gold. It helped us to adjust the messaging and actually discover what specific features are most needed by the users.
We were kind of surprised how many kind people write us really long and detailed feedback, so I encourage you to launch the landing page presenting the idea and validate the product that way.
Good luck with your product!
Where do you get reliable/convertible traffic from? Often I can't even get people to read free content and the majority of public forums strictly ban promotion of any kind.
We sent the links to our friends, ask here on IH for the feedback and also managed to get some traffic from reddit. Withing 3 weeks we managed to get around 500 unique users — that's not a lot but was enough for us to validate the idea itself. We didn't want to advertise, we wanted to gather feedback and received some.
I think maybe this is why I have such a hard time understanding how this validation approach works. I assume you need thousands of uniques to gather enough feedback. But maybe if it takes thousands just to get some feedback, that's validation that it's probably not a good product?
IMO, 500 is definitely way more than 0 users so you should take whatever you can get from whatever channels are available.
However, an important thing to be super careful about is this -
Are the folks coming to your landing page coming from forums, communities, channels where your intended audience hangs out? If not, the signals and feedback can be wrong and misleading.
So, in the early phase, quality of users and feedback (knowing their pain areas, background, context) matters more than getting a large sample size with binary (yes/no) feedback.
Yeah, that definitely makes sense. Thanks for the input.
Of course I meant 500 users :)
In my opinion, at early stage it's more about the quality of users and not the quantity :)
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