Why you should validate before developing?
Validating your product can enable you to reasonably predict whether people will buy it, and increase your changes of success?
Understanding validation
Here's why you should validate your product idea before developing.
What is validation?
Product validation is going to the market and getting feedback from potential customers to make sure there is a real need for your product and that people are willing to pay for it.
Why should we validate?
Validation takes guesswork out of the equation.
When you validate your product idea, you're less likely to waste time and money developing a product that no one wants. When you spend time understanding the customers' behaviours, challenges, and how they're currently trying to solve the problem. You need to truly understand the pain your prospective customers feel before you can develop the solution that would alleviate it.
Validation helps you listen and connect to your customers.
When you reach out to customers and consider their feedback, you are demonstrating that you care about them. Listening not only helps you build a better product, it creates trust with your customers before your product even reaches the market. This trust helps you create a build-measure-learn feedback loop to continue iterating on your product with your customer top-of-mind.
Validation lets you know whether you should build your product.
If you build a product without talking to customers first, you risk spinning your wheels - and losing a lot of money doing so. Validation decreases your risk before you begin to build and helps you know where to spend your resources.
Validation can help you improve your idea and make it a better fit for the market.
When you're validating an idea, you're making sure there's a market for it, as well as a demand for it. In fact, there's a good chance that your first round with product validation doesn't hit the mark but that's exactly why you are going through the process. The feedback you get from your customers will help you tweak your product and make it a better fit for your audience.
How can we validate a product?
There are a number of ways to validate your product idea:
- Conduct surveys and customer interviews
- Target market groups with polls on LinkedIn and Facebook
- Build a 'smoke-test' landing page
- Build a prototype and test using social media
- Find 10 people who are willing to pay a specific amount for the product
- Launch a pre-order campaign
Pro tips
Here are some tips to help you validate your product idea!
Start early
Start with a narrow audience
Conduct field research
Be flexible
Hey, I’m Jerrell!
I help you take the next step to turn your ideas into a successful software business.