From this article, you will learn:
- What steps you can take to make a good assessment of your digital product’s chances in the market;
- What is a persona, and how to define a target audience;
- How to interview with representatives of the target group and how to prepare for it;
- What are product discovery workshops and the business canvass of an idea, and how it will help you avoid trouble;
- How to prepare a business model based on Business Model Canvas and Lean Canvas;
- How launching a false advertising campaign can be a legitimate action.
Validation – assess the chances of your idea.
Validating your idea in the market is crucial to the success of any venture. Here are some steps you can take to validate your ideas:
- Market research. Conduct market research to determine if there is demand for your product or service. See if there are already similar solutions on the market and what results they have. Will there be room for your product as well?
- Survey potential customers. Conduct a survey or interviews with potential customers to find out if they are interested in your product or service. Does your product solve their problem? Will customers be willing to pay for it? Gather feedback and suggestions to help you improve your idea.
- Prototype Testing. Create a prototype of your product or service and test it on your target audience. Analyze reactions and feedback from real users to determine if your idea meets their expectations.
- Competitor analysis. Are there other products already on the market that solve the same problem? Research the competition to determine what their strengths and weaknesses are. Consider how your product or service can differentiate itself from other offerings in the market.
- Marketing strategy planning. Develop a marketing plan to help you reach your target audience and attract potential customers. Consider what communication and promotion channels will be most effective for your idea.
Only after carrying out the above steps will you better understand whether your idea will work in the market and whether it answers existing customer needs. It may turn out that your original assumptions were wrong. That’s why testing and getting feedback from potential users is crucial at every idea development stage. In the rest of the article, we suggest the best tools to conduct testing. Before that, however, a few sentences about the target audience.
Want to know more about validating ideas? Great! I’ve written over 100 pages of practical book on the subject, complete with knowledge, but also stories of founders who have validated (or not) their ideas. Be sure to check out more: https://walidacjapomyslow.pl/
Defining the target group
A common mistake founders make is assuming their solution will work for everyone. It doesn’t work that way, unfortunately. You must define your target audience – but how do you go about it? Defining your target audience is the process of determining the specific group of people your product, service, or marketing campaign is aimed at. In this process, you must consider the group’s characteristics and preferences, such as age, gender, income, interests, lifestyle, and buying behavior. As a result of these analyses, you will develop a persona, or fictional user, representing your target group.
Identifying your target audience will allow you to better tailor your offerings to the needs and expectations of potential customers, build a product ideally suited to your users, adjust your marketing and communications strategy, and reach potential customers more effectively, all of which will contribute to the success of your business.
Interviews with representatives of the target group
What do you do once you’ve reached your target audience? The best way is to talk to it. This will allow you to understand better your users’ needs, expectations, and preferences. You will get confirmation that the problem you want to solve exists and that representatives of your target group are struggling with it. This will help you tailor your products, services, and marketing strategies to the specific needs of your customers, which in turn will translate into greater interest, loyalty, and the chance to build long-term relationships with them.
How to talk? The best way is directly and openly. Don’t be afraid to talk about your ideas during the meeting you organize. Users may very quickly verify them, and you will get information that you need to look for another solution. It is also possible that they will point you in the right direction. You will learn many valuable lessons and answers to your doubts about the product from talking to potential customers. Therefore, it is worth preparing well for it.
Here are 8 tips:
- Determine the purpose of the interview. Before you start the interview with your target audience, think about what information you want to obtain, what questions you want to ask, and what goal you want to achieve with the interview.
- Prepare accordingly. Research your target audience better to understand their needs, expectations, and preferences. Prepare questions to get the information you need.
- Set a date for the interview. Contact representatives of the target group and set a date for the interview that suits both parties. Ensure you have the right interview tools, e.g., a phone or computer with internet access.
- Be open and empathetic. When talking, remember that you want to understand and help your target audience. Be open to their opinions and suggestions, listen carefully, and be empathetic.
- Ask questions. To get as much information as possible, ask the right questions. Let them be open-ended questions that allow the interviewee to elaborate on his or her thoughts and opinions.
- Note down important information. Try to note down the most essential information and conclusions. This will make it easier to develop an action strategy based on the data obtained.
- Say, thank you for the conversation. When the meeting is over, remember to thank the representatives of the target group for their time. Sending a thank you email or text message will also work well.
- Process the information. Once you have completed all the interviews with your target audience, analyze the information you have collected and use it to move forward with your project or product.
Product discovery workshop, a tour of the world of your product
An ultimate tool for validating your digital product’s chances in the market will be product discovery workshops. They will allow you to go from a general project vision to a detailed picture. You will determine what your app or website should include, which elements are a priority, and which are less so. With a product discovery workshop, you can also conduct various exercises to build the business canvas of your idea.
The main thing is a good plan!
What is a business canvas in practice? It’s a structured graph/table in which you collect specific information about your idea. Data collected in this way will later help you define your target audience (also in characterizing your marketing persona), create user stories, study the competition, analyze the market, and determine costs and revenues. This will help you look at the situation objectively. You will be able to see your project’s strengths and limitations. This will allow you to avoid costly mistakes at the very beginning and at the product development stage. It will also allow you to quickly verify whether the idea is attractive to customers, whether it has a chance of success in the market, and whether there are other obstacles to its implementation.
Preparing a business canvas will also allow you to assess your resources and limitations not related to the market but to your situation. Your product requires much more time or money than you are currently able to invest in it. The premise is that you should be able to assess, based on concrete data rather than intuition, whether this is the right time for your project.
Business Model Canvas and Lean Canvas
It’s a good idea to make yourself a Business Model Canvas or Lean Canvas early in building your business. These tools are used to develop and analyze a planned business model, focusing on nine key elements of a company. These are:
- Customer segments – who are the customers of the products or services?
- The value proposition – what benefits and value does the company offer customers?
- Distribution channels – how does the product reach customers?
- Customer relationships – what types of relationships does the organization build with customers?
- Revenue sources – where does the company generate revenue?
- Key resources – what resources are necessary for the business to operate?
- Key activities – what activities are required to implement the business plan?
- Cost structure – what costs does the company incur in its operations?
- Key partnerships – who does the company work with to achieve its goals?
By filling in the relevant fields within these tools, you will better understand your business and identify potential threats and opportunities. You will check your ability to meet the implementation of your idea and plan your growth strategy or adapt it to changing market conditions and customer needs. The ultimate goal is to create a sustainable and effective business model enabling your company to succeed and profit. You can read more about this in my book (https://walidacjapomyslow.pl/).
Invite customers to interact and check out your product.
This is an excellent way to see if your idea has potential in the market. Unlike traditional marketing research or surveys, you can dare to be quite unconventional. An interesting idea would be to prepare a temporary advertising campaign for your website or app. In what way? You can release a landing page and communicate that your product is ready or available for pre-sale. The prepared landing page must communicate as well as possible what the final version of the digital product will consist of. The whole thing must be accompanied by a social media advertising campaign – on Facebook, TikTok or Instagram – and posted only where your potential customers are.
Collecting newsletter sign-ups and pre-sales
You will verify interest in your campaign and product with a newsletter sign-up form on the landing page. The form must include user contact information fields, such as email address and name. You can also add additional questions to tailor the newsletter content to your audience’s expectations.
Sometimes, it is possible to introduce a preorder or pre-sale. This will work well for products such as an e-book or online course. You can encourage customers to pay for the whole thing and, in return, offer access to a few chapters or a few lessons, with a promise to deliver the final product or service within a few months. Note that you can only offer such a solution if you are confident you will deliver on your promise.
All right, but what about when you actually get newsletter subscribers, including those from pre-sales? Seize the opportunity and keep their attention by offering them valuable content. To expand your subscriber base, also encourage them to share your newsletter information with their friends.
Assessing the number of records
You can check whether your experiment had the desired effect in various ways. You can do this based on the number of database entries, the number of transactions, the number of uses of a particular feature or application, the number of clicks on an ad or link, the number of subscribers or followers on social media, or the number of page views on a website. It is also worth considering the quality of these records, that is, how valuable and helpful they are. For this, you can analyze the conversion rate, the ratio of the number of signups to the number of people who had the opportunity to sign up.
If you find that sign-ups are too few, and your product and the additional content you offer are not popular with potential customers despite the expiration of the allotted testing time, you may have to make a difficult decision. Giving up on an idea under such circumstances will be difficult, but it will protect you from poorly invested funds.
What about the subscribers you already have? You need to inform them of your decision and refund those who paid for your product. Let’s play fair!
However, let’s assume that everything went well and you already know that your idea will work in the market. Now, you need further testing. You need to verify which version of it will be the most attractive and functional for users. You need to know how to communicate with them and how they visually and physically perceive your product. To test this, you will need further tools. You will read about them in this article.
Test your idea with Push Buttons.
Idea validation is a mandatory step for any new business. It will help you avoid wrong decisions, unnecessary costs, and disappointment for you and your customers. At Push Buttons, we will guide you through this process. We have the knowledge and a range of tools to assess the actual chances of your idea when confronted with what is happening in the market.Make an appointment for a free consultation and check us out. We will test your idea!
