How to Gauge Interest in a Product Idea?

Hi
There are many ways to validate your idea, some elaborate and some quick and dirty. At the most basic level, I would say you should ask yourself these questions:

1. What problem am I trying to solve and who am I solving it for? You might consider framing your answer something like this:
   "I want to help person X do action Y so that situation Z improves."
   Example: "I want to help seniors save money on their prescriptions so that they can afford all of their medications"
   Example: "I want to help disabled people find clothing specifically designed for amputees so that amputees can comfortably attend formal events". If you can't frame your answer in a way that describes the problem you are solving, then you might not really have a problem to solve.

2. What evidence do I have to tell me it really is a problem? Don't trust your gut instinct. Do the research to validate that people are in fact experiencing this problem. Find communities of people who would agree "yes, this is a real problem and i'd pay someone to provide a solution".

3. How do I know people even want this problem solved? Sometimes keeping the problem alive is in someone's best interest and to solve it would alter the status quo. (See Failory.com story of the woman who developed a very interesting solution to identity validation for dating sites - only to learn that dating sites were completely OK with having fraudulent customer profiles on their site. Turns out, the dating sites desired profile volume over profile quality and were not interested in taking fraudulent profiles off of their site.

Anyway, there is certainly a lot more to this topic, but hopefully this is helpful to you in some way.

Good luck with your ideas!

Cheers!

Pmox2018

Hi Tobe! You'll receive the following advice for sure:

1. Don't build anything (code/whatever-wise), just your landing page where you try to sell your idea and get email signups + build your audience by content marketing.

2. Try to go B2B if possible, instead B2C.

3. Don't care about getting drowned by bigger businesses.

Augmenting 1), once you have a few people interested, you can do the work for them manually, and always automate (with program / infrastructure) the parts that are the tightest bottlenecks in your manual procedure.

This way, you don't spend time building something people don't need, spend time on marketing properly upfront, and earn money from the manual service while figuring out what the clients actually need (which will be different than your first idea).

Bonus: for landing page structure, https://www.julian.com/guide/growth/landing-pages is invaluable.

Super-bonus: listen to all the podcasts in IH from Ep 1 to 15, which will give you plenty of perspective.

I was delivering pizza when I had an idea for an app that drivers could use to make deliveries better and faster. However, I wanted to make money from the store owners, as that's where the real value was in terms of making deliveries more reliable and less annoying.

I started to build an app, spend a month or two on it. Eventually I asked the boss. He didn't seem interested. Then I asked a few other store owners, none of them really cared beyond the platitudinous "oh yeah that'd be cool". It was clear there was no real demand for it.

Drivers liked the idea, but they would't have had the money to spend on it, they'd want it as a free app.

TLDR: talk to the people whose problem you're trying to solve. It costs nothing and if you're careful you won't waste time on an idea that's going nowhere.

This comment was deleted 7 years ago