The Four Types of Product Validation (and How to Use Them to De-risk Your Idea)

Validation is often talked about as one monolithic concept. But if you're looking to turn your product idea into a business, there are a few different lenses you should use for validating to see the full picture. If you can crack these four you'll be unstoppable, if you ignore any of them you'll struggle to grow.

1. Value: whether customers will buy it or users will choose to use it
2. Marketing: whether you can bring in new users in a cost-efficient way
3. Usability: whether users can figure out how to use it
4. Feasibility: whether you can build what you need with the time, skills and technology you have

1. Value

Whether customers will buy it or users will choose to use it

Establishing compelling value is the most important part of the validation process. The other risks only matter if your product is something people want to use, so this is where you should be spending most of your time.

Properly validating the value of your product idea could fill a whole post (/book), but a few key pointers:

• Figure out what problem your product is trying to solve, and who for
• Discover whether your target audience view this as a valuable problem to solve
• You can get a high-level idea of this by finding out whether your target audience are A) searching Google or asking in communities for advice on this problem, and even better B) already paying for solutions to it
• But nothing beats speaking to your target customers. I'm happy to be the millionth person to recommend The Mom Test on here, it's a short and invaluable book that walks through how to do this.
• Don't directly ask people if your idea is good - you won't get an honest answer. Instead, ask about their existing behaviours and habits: "What's your biggest problem with managing your ecommerce store?", "How are you currently solving this problem?", "What are the implications of not solving this problem?" etc.
• Once you've validated that the problem exists, you need to validate that people will pay for your solution. It's time to build your MVP and start selling it

2. Marketing

Whether you can bring in new users in a cost-efficient way

Finding marketing channels that work for your business is key. If you can't get in front of your target customers, it doesn't matter how good your product is.

There are no guarantees about which marketing channels will work best for you - you have to test. A few top principles of testing:

• Taking on 5+ channels at once risks spreading yourself too thin. Instead focus on 2-3 channels at a time. This will also make it easier to see where you’re not achieving traction so you can drop a channel and move on to the next.
• Make sure at least some of the channels you are testing with have fast feedback loops. Think ads, marketing in communities, cold email/LinkedIn. If you are only betting on channels with slow feedback loops (e.g. SEO, organic Twitter growth etc.) it'll be months before you can see whether any of your marketing is working.
• Don’t abandon testing a channel too quickly. You can’t expect to find the best approach for every channel straight away. Test different messaging, see what gets the most interest and then iterate on the winners.

If you’ve got no marketing experience, don’t worry. As you gain experience it will become easier to see what good performance looks like.

3. Usability

Whether users can figure out how to use it

If you want users to stick around, the effort they put into learning how to use your software has to be proportional to the value you're delivering. If I download a cocktail recipe app I don't want to spend more than a minute or two working out how to use it - I could've made an Old Fashioned in that time.

On the other hand, a business user who's switching to a new CRM probably knows how much time a better CRM could save them, and will be willing to invest time in learning how to use it (if they think the product looks good).

To validate usability, make sure you are regularly checking in with a few of your target customers as you build to get design feedback and ensure it's usable. If you have a more complex product where usability risk is more of a concern, it's smart to validate user flows using wireframes before you build anything.

Remember that as the maker, you will never be able to provide an objective opinion on the usability of your product. Of course it all makes complete sense to you, you've spent hours thinking about how it should fit together!

4. Feasibility

Whether you can build what you need with the time, skills and technology you have

Validating feasibility is more important for bigger companies, as they bring many people/skills together to build complex products within strict timelines. That said, feasibility risk raises useful questions for small teams and solo founders to think about:

• Do you have a clear plan of how you can build your product?
• If there are a lot of unknowns about whether you'll be able to build it, how might you build an MVP that tackles all the big unknowns?
• If it will take month to build your MVP, can you scope down to the 2 or 3 most important features? This will reduce feasibility risk and also allow you to validate the value of your product in the market sooner

Wrapping up

Validating value and your marketing are crucial if you want to create a successful business. Not having perfect usability from the get-go isn't going to kill your product (unless people straight up can't use it). Likewise, not validating feasibility upfront might slow you down but probably won't stop you from building your product (eventually).

I hope this brings awareness about the different risks your product will face and how you can validate each of them early. When you're building products, uncertainty comes with the territory. Be smart about how you handle it to make sure you are betting your limited time and money in the right places.

Credit to Marty Cagan and his 'Four Big Risks' which I've leaned on heavily for this.