Validation of your ideas

As a founder, you've probably had a "power determines" moment, which is like catching lightning in a bottle when you have an idea that makes you run to tell your friends, family, and even confused strangers you meet on the street.

Nine times out of ten, the "product or a brand!" moment is followed right away by a strong desire to start building, because you know in your heart of hearts how awesome your idea is, and you want to get it out into the world as quickly as possible so everyone else can see how awesome it is, too.

Then, before you know it, it's been months and you've spent tens of thousands of dollars and a lot of sleepless nights making a product that, as it turns out, nobody really wants.

Plan Your Research.

Good research is the secret weapon of startup ideas. It can cut months or even years off the time it takes to launch a new product. During this phase, we will focus on making a Research Plan that will help us evaluate new startup ideas quickly and in a very efficient way.

A research plan is a list of checks and exercises you can do to make sure you have a good understanding of the market you're going into. You don't want to tell an investor about a "revolutionary new idea" only to hear that it's been done 20 times before.

You also shouldn't give up on your idea just because you saw an ad on Google for a company that sounds similar to yours. We'll help you find out who's out there and how to judge them correctly.

You might consider for your critical point such as:

Set Your Research Objective

To avoid getting stuck in a "black hole" of research, you should focus on specific questions that will help you figure out if your idea is possible. There are few question that yo need to consider about it.

What Problem Does My Startup Or Idea Tackle, And How Severe Is It?

Take a glance around at the things and services you use and are surrounded by right now. What are they doing there? It's because they're fixing a problem or meeting a need that you wouldn't otherwise have. A problem or need is the source of all great inventions and beginning businesses. Great businesses have been created on large challenges since the invention of electricity, the telephone, the Internet, and, more recently, Google and Facebook. "What problem does my startup or idea tackle, and how painful would be that problem?" is the first question on your startup litmus test. Consider this question carefully, since an honest answer could save you hours, days, weeks, months, or even years of time.

Who And How Much Are Affected By The Problem?

You're effectively establishing the size of the market for your solution by evaluating who is affected by the problem and to what extent. One of the most crucial components of evaluating a startup idea is market size, which must be properly estimated.

Begin by establishing your Total Addressable Market (TAM) and the industry in which you operate. Then you segment that industry statistic down to the segment within your industry, keeping in mind your competitors' numbers for benchmarking purposes. Too frequently, entrepreneurs just obtain an industry figure and utter the terrible phrase, "If we only grab 1% of this market…" This is a sloppy method that could cost you money in the long run. Do your research and stay away from the 1 percent top-down approach. It's time to figure out who you'll be competing against now that you've determined you have a market worth pursuing.

What Are The Strengths And Weaknesses Of Those Who Are Already Attempting To Solve The Problem?

If you've recognized a problem that affects a large number of individuals, chances are that someone else has as well. Find out how and who else is approaching the problem. Even though other organizations are attempting to tackle the same problem as you, they may approach it in an entirely different manner. Competition can be a hindrance, but it can also be a sign that you've discovered a problem worth pursuing. After you've identified a few significant players, you'll need to do a SWOT analysis of those competitors. Determine the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats that each one possesses. You may believe your idea is unique and that no one has ever solved the problem you're working on, but that doesn't excuse you from responsibility. Determine what people are doing now to address the issue. It may not be the ideal answer for the problem, but a customer's current behavior can be tough to replace if it meets their demands. Customers' present solutions to alleviate the pain produced by the problem are competitors for you, and should be treated as such.

Use Trustworthy Research Sources

There are several well-known resources for obtaining immediate responses. We will direct you to the distributors who are the best fit for your product. It's one thing to know what to look for; another is to know where to look. Answers to these questions are likely to have appeared in a few key search indexes and databases. Most likely, you've already found some answers in these searches, but just to be sure, we'll conduct a more thorough search to ensure we didn't overlook anything.

Searches By Industry

While a Google search may reveal many of the possible competitors you're looking for, this is usually only the first step. The second step is to look into industry-specific sources, such as marketplaces, crowdfunding sites, and trade associations, to see if your competitors are providing similar products.

Funded Businesses

After you've figured out who your competitors are, you'll want to assess them.

Check if they are identified as a funded company as a quick way to do so. While receiving angel or venture capital money does not guarantee a company's success, it does indicate that it has been reviewed through professional channels in order to make it through the funding process. As a result, you'll want to know which of your competitors is more qualified, which may lead to the discovery of tangential competitors in some circumstances.

Think About What You Found

Once you've gathered all of your information, we'll want to examine it with a critical eye. Evaluating your research is actually more difficult than conducting it since it needs you to "zoom out" and consider the competitive landscape.

Is The Situation Severe Enough To Warrant A Solution?

Vitamins are more difficult to sell than painkillers. You must persuade someone that they require a vitamin, yet customers are well aware that they must get a painkiller when they require it. Your proposal will be more likely to have a niche consumer base if it is more of a "painkiller" than a "vitamin." Determine whether you require a vitamin or a painkiller.

Startup founders are frequently faced with an idea that appears feasible but does not address a problem that people care about in a significant way. According to Y Combinator founder and investor Paul Graham, many of these firms are created by people who are merely "trying to conceive up startup ideas" rather than looking for problems.

These are what Graham refers to as "made-up" or "sitcom" startup ideas, because they sound like something a sitcom writer might come up with while writing a script for a character with a business concept. The concept appears feasible, even though it is awful and no one would use or buy it.

Is Our Market Potential Large Enough To Support A Viable Business?

Sometimes there is an opportunity, but it isn't large enough to turn into a viable business. If there are three other pizza shops in the neighborhood where you want to open your pizza business, you may still be the greatest, but there are only so many people who will buy pizza, and spreading your income among three other competitors could be difficult.

Some enterprises aren't particularly profitable. Some entrepreneurs are content to launch lifestyle enterprises that they can own and operate while earning a decent living. That's perfectly alright if it's you! That's something to consider as you create your own success statistic. Because everyone's business size objectives are unique, we'll assess whether the market appears to be large enough to proceed.

Can You Outsmart The Opposition?

Putting together a good competitive analysis will help you compare your ideas with what's already on the market. You may find that some of the features you had in mind are "table stakes" that everyone has to have, and if you want to win customers, you'll have to focus on a very specific feature. When you move on to the next step of figuring out if something is possible, these decisions will become very important.

Validation Ideas By Expert

We seek expert guidance on how to approach the problem, market, and sector given that we know there is an opportunity in the market. Consider this process to be similar to asking your college lecturer what the test answers are before you begin the course.
In almost every scenario, there are professionals who are familiar with many of the solutions you seek and are eager to share that knowledge with you. Finding the correct experts and asking them extremely detailed questions about your concept is the issue.
You must then be able to objectively examine the input you've received, as even professionals might make mistakes in their analysis.

We'll take three steps to tackle this such

• Expert Picking: We'll figure out which areas of your ideas need expert advice and then select the best experts to comment on those specific issues.
• Important Questions: We now have to get the most out of your time with specialists, so we'll focus our queries on only a few key points that will help us determine the best course of action for our future endeavors.
• Analyzing the Results: Finally, we'll examine the data to determine if there are any trends that we can use to improve our business strategy.

First Stage

Not most experts are supposed to be equal, which is something that many new Founders ignore. Your millionaire real estate grandfather may know a lot about how his business operates, but he isn't the appropriate person to ask about the viability of your social mobile app. We'll construct a profile of who the perfect specialists are and then figure out where to find them in this stage.

• Experts in the Field
• Founders with extensive experience
• Investors

Experts in their fields. From building code to collecting consumers to managing vendor relationships, your business concept may have a lot of moving components that require different skills. Depending on the roadblocks we uncover during the research plan phase, we'll need to find subject matter experts who can tell us how difficult each aspect of our business model is.

Founders with extensive experience. The people who started similar businesses are a great source of information, and they also seem to enjoy helping people who want to start their own businesses. There's no better way to figure out what to avoid in your new business than talking to others who have done it before, whether successfully or not. A solid talk with a seasoned founder can also lead to beneficial introductions that can significantly speed up your strategy.

Investors. Talking to investors early in the development of your concept is more about acquiring the perspective of someone who studies startup business models for a living than it is about raising money (yet). Investors can provide valuable insight into how big they think your market will be or where they've seen comparable concepts in the market. You don't have to be raising funds to receive positive comments from investors.

Second Stage: Important Questions

We'll really like to make the most of our limited time with our specialists, so deciding on the specific questions we want to be answered is crucial. Although the question sets will vary depending on your topic, we like to create our questions around four main themes:

Is this even possible?

We'd want to question folks who are familiar with our field if the chances of success are reasonable. There will almost certainly be a few big roadblocks to growing this company, which we want to identify as early as feasible.

What pitfalls should we stay away from?

The advantage of speaking with seasoned specialists is that they can advise you exactly which traps to avoid. We aim to make a list of the most common issues identified by these experts and devise a strategy for avoiding a similar destiny.

Who else should we speak with?

It's unlikely that the first few experts you find are the only ones who know everything there is to know about this subject. As a result, we'd like to concentrate on obtaining introductions to experts who might be able to provide even more insight into our market difficulties. This could include requesting additional resources such as books, blogs, or individuals.

What are we not inquiring about?

We can only create a collection of questions based on what we already know. Early on in our exploration, we'll want to enlist the expertise of specialists to broaden our base of queries even further, resulting in more specific and targeted inquiries.

With the goal of collecting actionable feedback from each expert, questions should be tailored to them and their subject matter expertise. Before moving on to the next phase, which involves talking to consumers, we're also aiming to get as much information and insight as possible about the company itself.

Third Stage: Analyzing the Results

Depending on what our experts say, you might think, "This is the best idea ever!" or "This is the worst idea ever, and you should do anything else with your time." Remember that the experts are there to help you find answers, not to make the final decision about whether or not we should do anything with this idea.

Were we forced to stop or start over?

When you talk to people about your idea, sometimes they'll tell you it's not possible as it is. For example, a lawyer might tell you it's not legal. In this case, we may have to go back to the research phase, and we will look for experts again later.

What was the most dependable chance?

When you talked to experts about your new product, what was the most obvious benefit or chance? We'll need to talk to customers about that to make sure they agree.

Is it time to talk with clients?

If we think the feedback we've gotten is a good sign that this idea could work and we don't need to do more research, it's time to talk to customers.

Getting Advice from Experts

We'll also want to look at how well the experts themselves served as sources, as well as the answers we get. Sometimes a very qualified expert can't give a good interview, in which case we may need to talk to more experts in the field to find out more

Trying to Get a Second Opinion

We might also want to get a second opinion on the advice we got if it seems too far off. For example, if we talk to one investor and they say, "It'll never get funded," we might want to talk to one or two more investors to make sure it's not just one person's bias.

Expert feedback is helpful because it gives us a much clearer picture of what it would take to make our idea work than when we first went in.

Now that we've found credible industry experts, had meaningful conversations with them, and analyzed our findings, we should have a good idea of which parts of our idea to move forward with and which ones need to be rethought, retooled, or even thrown out.

If the comments we get tell us that our idea is still a good one. We can start to focus on making sure we're building the right product for our customers. What should we do? Just ask them!

Discovery For Your Clients

So far, we've done research to make sure that there is a problem in the market that your idea can solve and that well-known experts have said you're on the right track. Now we start the last test of early validation, which is finding out what customers want.

We're using customer discovery as a method to make sure that the problem you've identified and the solution you've come up with match what customers really want at a price they're willing to pay.
Discovery your client is based on the Problem, the Solution, and the Revenue Model, which are the three most important parts of your business model. Now that you know customers probably have a problem worth solving, you need to find out if your solution is the right one and if someone would pay for what you'll make. Customer Discovery will test these ideas so that you can improve your product before you even start building it.

The 4 steps that make up the Customer Discovery Method are:

• Make archetypes of your customers: Usually, you need to make a number of customer profiles that show how the product can be used in different ways. In this step, we'll describe each customer archetype in detail.
• Choose a way to make sure it's true: There are many ways to validate and prove that your business assumptions are correct.
• Check if the customer is right. Whether you use a survey or a landing page to validate your idea, you should talk to customers from each profile archetype to find out if the Problem, Solution, and Revenue Model fit their needs.
• Evaluate Your Results Once we have all the survey results, we'll look at what we've learned and decide if we need to do more rounds of customer discovery. If not, we'll start putting together our business plan based on what we've learned.

You'll probably find that your first few conversations with customers will give you a lot of "aha!" moments that will force you to make big changes to your plan. Soon after that, the value of customer interviews that come after starts to drop quickly.

First stage: Make archetypes of your customers

There are many kinds of customers. They tend to be different based on how they use your product and, of course, how they are different as people. Before you start your surveys, we'll help you figure out very specific customer archetypes to make sure you get a good mix of feedback to put together.

What are some common use cases?

Use cases are the best way to start dividing your customers into different "archetypes."

• How would people be able to buy your product?
• Before they find your product, what problem do people have?
• What are the different ways people use your product?

Attributes of the Customer Archetype: Each archetype will have certain characteristics that are important to your product. Don't make this hard. Don't try to build a customer archetype around price if the price isn't a meaningful attribute. Focus on simple, clear characteristics that show who your audience is.

Choose strong customer candidates. Your potential consumers can frequently be discovered lurking on well-known social networks, which is where you will probably find them after you start advertising. A direct recruiting effort typically works best in this situation because we are only targeting a small number of individuals..

• Public Forums
• Social Media Sites (Linkedin, FB, Twitter)
• Beautiful interaction transitions

2nd Stage: Select Your Validation Approach

Real interactions with your potential clients are the key to validating your business. The possibilities are unlimited, whether it be through a survey they complete, Facebook advertising they push, talking to passersby on the street, or personally running a trial with a test subject.

Select your validation strategy:

Landing Pages - With a short landing page, you can describe the key characteristics and provide a photo or mockup of the product. In order to determine whether individuals are actually interested in what you have to offer, you should include a name and email capture area (call-to-action) on your landing page. Or, in the ideal scenario, you have a button that enables pre-orders. Pre-selling your solution demonstrates that there is a market for what you have to offer.

Ads on social media or through Google Adwords are effective ways to find out what your target market is interested in. It enables you to deliver well-chosen advertising to your intended audience. This strategy aids in determining a variety of commercial aspects, such as: How much might it cost to attract a potential customer? Which phrases, depictions, and emotional clues connect with your intended audience? Yes, if they click the advertisement. If no one is interested, think about improving and modifying it.

Surveys (using TypeForm, AskYourTargetMarket, Google Forms, and SurveyMonkey.com):

Online surveys can be carried out by posting them on social media and in groups. Or, as an alternative, in-person interviews, which you might possibly do one-on-one or through a focus group, can be highly beneficial. Where are my target clients, you could ask? Do they have jobs there? Are they situated elsewhere? Talk to them if you can find them!

Trials by hand:

Let's take a look at an illustration of manual validation through a test experiment. Consider developing a smartphone app or piece of software to assist customers in ordering and delivering groceries. You might begin by signing up a test customer and completing each step manually before developing the app. You could personally take a test customer's grocery order after you've established a relationship with them, buy their groceries, and then deliver them to their door.

Third Stage: Validate customers' feedback.

The goal of your customer research and interactions is to validate and improve three business hypotheses: the Problem, Solution, and Revenue Model. These three hypotheses are not the only ones that can be based on your experiences with customers, but they frequently serve as the starting point for additional research.

Problem

Every brand-new business idea starts with a challenge that needs to be overcome. Your presumption is that your potential clients will share your perception of the issue and be searching for a solution. Here, we wish to enter the minds of the customers to view the issue from their perspective.

• How do your clients perceive the issue? (Explain in detail)
• What part of the issue hurts the most?

Solution

Your recommendation should be in line with the area of the issue that causes the most suffering. This calls for you to examine the numerous aspects of your product and make sure that the areas on which you're concentrating your product efforts are commensurate with those on which clients have the biggest demand.

• How are consumers resolving the issue right now?
• Which aspects of the solution are most appealing?
• What issues would still remain if the remedy was available?

Revenue streaming model

Price sensitivity, frequency (such as recurring models), and friction will all be tested in the revenue model questions (such as the complexity of paying for your product).

• Would a client agree to pay for this?
• What is its value?
• Is this a one-time purchase or a recurring one?