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12 Comments

Idea validation

I have tons of ideas, but no idea where to start for validating them.

Does anyone have suggestions on validating my product fits the needs of customers ?

  1. 5

    Go to customers, and collect cash... questions usually don't matter. See if they are willing to walk the talk.

    1. 1

      collect cash

      Who is going to pay for nothing?

    2. 1

      Thank you. I think this is the best approach. Friends can say things like yeah that's a good idea, but until hard cash is on the table it's all talk.

  2. 3

    The answer largely depends on the types of product ideas you are having. Broadly speaking, product ideas fall into 2 buckets:

    • a problem that you struggle with;
    • a problem that your think other people struggle with.

    The former is akin to scratching your own itch. You already know what the pain points are, you just need to articulate the underlying issue to yourself then build a first version. After you’ve built a product that meets your needs, you could then ask around to see if others would be willing to pay for it. This was how Elon Musk built SpaceX because this was something he personally wanted to exist.

    The latter type of idea is much trickier since it involves an untested assumption—what you think is the problem other people struggle with. For this you have to follow Paul Graham’s advice by talking to potential users early. Since your solution can only be as good as your understanding of a problem domain, you don’t want to run the risk of building the wrong thing, you want to build what your users want.

  3. 1

    For me the best approach is to think of offering it first as a service.

    Can you approach people who potentially have this issue (either through cold outreach or warm leads)and have them pay you to do it for them?

    If you can, you would have validated a market need - people are willing to pay money to have a specific problem solved. The other way to look at it is, are people already paying other service providers to solve this problem? However, this way is riskier as you assume these same people are willing to pay YOU to solve their problem.

    Once you have people paying you for that service, you can then invest yourself more into customer development, finding out what is the best way to allow them to self-serve and solve this problem for themselves via a product or a productized-service.

    Hope that helped in some way!

  4. 1

    Write a list, pick your favorite one and just do it man. The faster you do it the better. Super unlikely one of the ideas is going to be a huge hit overnight, and will most likely require a ton of work to get traction.

    If you can code, Github pages and static html page with mailchimp and a couple of hours of work + $100 on facebook ads will do.

    If you can't code, use a page builder and then do the same process above.

  5. 1

    Get on the phone with potential clients and ask good questions. Don't tell them you have a soluation, look to confirm your udnerstanding of their problem. If you are discovering something commmon amongst them and a solution comes away then consider the idea validated!

  6. 1

    Lots of people on here go down the road of first building a landing page using something like https://carrd.co and then collecting feedback from this forum.

  7. 1

    I run a problem validation platform - needgap where people post the problem they have for startups to solve, many others post ideas in the comments to solve a particular problem.

    Several products are already being created to solve some of those problems at needgap from those discussions.

    You're welcomed to share your idea if it solves any of the problems and validate it directly with someone who would need it to be made. Just, keep in mind that the ideas goes into comments as fresh posts are for problems only.

  8. 1

    If you don't already have customers with a real problem it's better to solve a problem you currently have.

    You could of course go find people and ask them but a) it's difficult to get honest answers from people and b) it would probably be expensive to get enough data to make an informed decision.

  9. 1

    Reach out to potential customers, let them know you're working on a product related to X and would love to learn a bit about their experience and pain-points so that you can build something that solves a need. Even if a small percent are willing to hop on a call then that's a start!

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