How to validate product ideas?

Just build mvp in less than 2 weeks and share on as many channels as possible. Users always lie. You'll not get proper feedback for them like I'll use this or I'll pay for this. Best way is to just launch your idea in mvp and build new functions on top based on traction after launch

When people say, build an MVP in two weeks and launch, I can only assume that they mean to do that while you're working on your project full-time.

If you only work on your project 2-4 hours a day it's totally fine to release an MVP in 1-2 months as well. But that is a slow process.

Although possible, it really depends on what you're building, some things just take a bit more time to build. What I've learned is that its fie to release your first MVP after a few months, but you really want some confirmation to prove that people will be willing to pay for what you're building.

IMO, start out with a simple landing page where you clearly lay out the problem that you're solving for the users. And ask for a pre-order.

Advertise on reddit, facebook, wherever till you get your first pre-order, once you get a user willing to pay for a non-existing product, you've got a little bit of validation there that you're going in the right direction.

Afterwards, talk to the people who bought the pre-order and try to further understand if it's really a pain point from there.

Once you've confirmed all of this (should take you about 1-2 weeks) then build the product and release it as early as possible to your pre-ordered customers (early adopters) - gather feedback, iterate and keep asking for feedback.

You'll never be fully "validated" but this is a great way to try to understand if you're going in the right direction without wasting 6+ months building a product no one wants.

Alternatively, if you already have existing competitors, you can be a bit lazier about validation, since there clearly are people that are willing to pay for the solution, then the question is how are you better/different?

Validation is so hard that it's easier to talk about what you should not do. So let me at least give you that point.

For a quite a while now folks recommend pre-selling your product but I can imagine this likely going wrong.

What if you get only a few pre-orders and you undercut the expected amount to convince yourself to work on the product? As it's already unlikely that people pre-order an inexistent solution from a stranger this scenario is likely to happen. If you end up canceling and disappointing your early adopters this would harm your reputation.

For me, a validation approach should be easily repeatable because you probably go through the process for multiple ideas. I don't see this with pre-selling.

Hi! There are many ways and tools to gather potential user feedback to validate a product idea. Here are some options that you might find useful:

Social media: In addition to LinkedIn, you can use other social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to reach out to potential users and get feedback on your product idea.

Surveys: Online survey tools like SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, and Typeform can help you create and distribute surveys to collect feedback from potential users.

User testing: User testing tools like UserTesting.com, TryMyUI, and Userlytics can help you get feedback on your product from real users.

Landing pages: You can create a landing page for your product idea and use tools like Google Analytics and Hotjar to track user behavior and gather feedback on the product.

Online communities: Online communities like Reddit, Hacker News, and Product Hunt can be great places to get feedback on your product idea.

Customer discovery interviews: Conducting one-on-one interviews with potential users can give you valuable insights into their needs and preferences.

If your product has not yet been implemented and you only think about how it will look like and what functionality it will have, then I advise you to seek consult https://tech-stack.com/services/consulting-service from professionals in custom software development.

Remember that the key to getting useful feedback is to ask specific questions and listen to your users' feedback carefully. Good luck with your product idea!

What worked well for me is talking with potential clients and see how they react to your proposal. If you're solving a pressing pain they'll get excited about you building it. Bonus points if you can manage to get presells

You can try starting local by doing some door to door (meeting business owners in person)

Or go on Reddit and try different subreddits to see how people react to your proposal

Good luck!

I'm interested in this question because I'm also having trouble validating my website (https://hollowverse.com/). It has a decent amount of views, so clearly people are interested in the content, but user interaction is non-existent in website whose end goal is to have user generated content. Tough nut to crack so far.

Cold DMs are my go to for early users.

If you can solve the problem for one person you can solve it for many.

I created the Solopreneur Product Proposal to help me validate/invalidate my ideas. Hopefully it can be helpful to you. You can watch or/and download.

I use landing page of yep.so

depending on the product idea the medium changes linkedin, reddit etc.

But pls do read The moms test before you start talking to the users

One approach here is to:
(1) Consider whatever feedback is implicit in the thesis that's causing you to think about the idea in the first place (so, "I'm considering a hammer that doesn't hurt when you hold it" suggests that you have an idea that users don't like that hammers hurt to hold).
(2) Watch users using whatever the closest existing analogue to your product already is (in the example, extant hammers, either directly or by reading forum posts or whatever).
(3) Get a prototype or MVP built as quickly as possible and listen to your users using it.

This sidesteps the problem of literally surveying users about your idea. I'm sure this is a valuable process, but (i) it can be hard / expensive to do and (ii) between failures of self-knowledge (on the part of users) and problems of interpreting what they say, it can be hard to make good, realistic inferences based on such surveys.

Good luck!

I'm actually building something right now that would be able to validate your product idea(s) easily. I'd love to hop on a call with you at some point. Feel free to reach out to me via email: [email protected]

I like YC Startupschool to validate and all the next steps.

When finding a good problem to solve it is important to understand how frequent and how painful the problem is.

Paperwork when buying a house is painful? You have a customer once every few years. Need to go quickly to meet a business contact? Frequent and painful.

The more painful the more people are willing to pay for it.

For finclout, our users use Google and a variety of others sites to aggregate the research they need to write their article.

On finclout they can get aggregated insights (Key Opinion Leaders, News articles, KPI's, Insider transactions, etc), and can then easily syndicate and monetize all in one place.

Check https://www.altexsoft.com/blog/product-idea-validation/

I put together working prototypes quickly and posted about them on relevant subreddits.

Two approaches I’ve tried and received good response:

• Start from your own need, i.e. you’re the customer of your product, then talk to friends and post the idea in the community.
• Improve an existing product. This is safer since the market has been proven. But it needs to have some features/highlights that you can do WAY better than the existing one.

Hey Sonic,

My latest article on IndieHackers, "The Right Way to Validate a Startup Idea," is available at: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/the-right-way-to-validate-a-startup-idea-ee723347c7.

If you need assistance with this, we can do an audit of your current position.

You mentioned you're already using LinkedIn and talking to people in your network—how are their responses? I imagine that some people who already know you might sugarcoat their answers. In this case, cold outreach might help!

Bernard Huang from Clearscope set up coffee meetings with other industry professionals nearby and walked them through his idea with a slide deck. He had a slide with a tentative price at the end to gauge their interest.

Wrote about it here if you want to learn more: https://www.demandcurve.com/blog/how-bernard-huang-grew-clearscope

You can also use Bernard's outreach email for inspiration :)

I follow the audience first approach so I start validating from the moment I find a problem I want to solve and I only write the first line of code once I am somehow certain that there is demand for it