What's a good response rate during idea validation?
So I've been talking to potential customers about the problem I'm trying to solve and my proposed solution, and here's a breakdown of the results. Out of 13 people I talked to:
- 11 agree that the problem is a big one and they would pay for a solution
- 9 expressed an interest in seeing the solution (or a mock up of it)
out of the 9 who I sent the mock up to:
- 5 think it's great and want to do a trial. However, it turned out that 2 of these were the "wrong" customer i.e. they don't have the authority to purchase my solution or even to introduce it at their company
- 1 think it's great and will work well for others but not his company because of they way they work
- the other 3 haven't returned my call or replied to my follow up email
So out of 13 warm prospects, I have 3 wanting to start a trial who have the authority to purchase and introduce it at their company.
Is this enough to start building?
I have to understand if you have collected valuable or biased data. I can't tell for sure even if you described the entire process, but there are a few things that could help.
If the people that wanted to start a trial were looking for solutions and you can build one better than competitors, in my opinion, you have enough to start building an MVP:
hi, thanks for replying.
I started out just by talking about the problem (we have the same problem at my company). Then I started researching a solution and created a mockup , which I emailed to the people who were interested in seeing it.
Almost everyone in my industry uses email + spreadsheets for one particular task, but that has issues which my solution is trying to address. Some are using a shared online spreadsheet but that's only marginally better.
About half the people I talked to had tried other solution but then gone back to email + spreadsheet because the other solutions were generic software (eg. trello) which didn't fit the use case.
If they tried and paid for other solutions, then you can start building. Maybe ask how much they were paying for other solutions, so that you can understand how much they were willing to spend.