If you go up to people and ask them what they think of your idea, they’ll simply tell you that it was a good one, assuming that you’re waiting to hear something positive from them. the reason they do that is because they believe that this is how they’re showing you their support.
It’s most common that if you’re asking other people about the idea itself, you’re still at the early stages of the idea and haven’t validated it yet.
Products bought by businesses are much easier to validate than products based on consumer emotion, leisure, and entertainment, as businesses pay for the products they use right away.
There are 3 steps that you can follow to validate your idea:
1. Creating a problem theory from your idea
2. Setting up a system to attract people
3. Finding the pain pattern
1. Creating a problem theory from your idea
This has been briefly explained in my previous article, so I’ll be quick. Converting ideas into problem theories allows you to concentrate on validating the idea instead of finding a solution.
Making sure that enough people have that same problem is vital, because you wouldn’t want to get stuck creating a solution and then searching for the problem that solves it!
If you’re working with an existing product, always make sure to constantly get feedback from your customers. Feedback is very important, so keep a channel open between you and them and use the information that you get to think of ideas that enlighten your theory.
2. Setting up a system to attract people
After creating a problem theory you’ll know your target customer and a good idea of what you need to learn.
If it’s an existing product that you’re working on, and just adding a feature to it, you’ll most probably be able to contact your customers via email. Your objective is to find creative ways to attract and talk to them.
Ideas to get existing customers to talk to you:
· Email to ask for feedback
· Create a pop-up window on your website to set a time to talk to them
· Provide a chat window/ option on your website (at the top or bottom corner)
· If their numbers are provided to you, give them a call
As for a new product idea, you’ll need to create a system to attract people- unless you already have access to some of your potential customers. The most frequently used method is by creating a landing page that would lead to a survey that people will fill out. Needless to say, the survey will include the most relevant questions for you and also will be providing them with an option to chat with you- if they’re willing to of course.
The Landing Page
You want to make the landing page as attractive as possible to arouse the curiosity of the people by explaining to them the advantages of solving the problem that you’ve created in your theory. Proceeding then could be done by either adding their email, clicking the button or authenticating with a third-party service like Twitter, Google or Linkedin.
You don’t wanna be spending a lot of time creating your landing page- just a basic one would do. In some cases it would be more useful to spend more time getting people’s emails first or have them authenticate with a third-party service.
It’s very much worth reminding you that your goal is finding potential customers to talk to and validate your idea and not to acquire customers.
The Survey
Next, you want to ask people a few questions after they’ve clicked on the button you provided, entered their email or authenticated. The goal behind this survey is to know more about your potential customers and gather their information for future contact.
Each question in your survey should have a particular purpose behind it.
3 types of idea validation questions are:
i. Market Intelligence
You need to identify two factors:
ü What are you up against?
ü What are people using currently?
The answers to these 2 simple questions will provide you with a potential customer acquisition strategy along with potential partnerships and integrations.
ii. Qualifiers
These help you filter people to target the ones that you should follow up with and divide responses to other questions.
iii. Discovery
The responses you’ve received by now are going to be useful when you need to write a marketing copy and test your landing page. So, read every answer you got and divide your open-ended ones into buckets. Open-ended questions highlight the words that people use the most.
iv. Traffic
You need to drive traffic to your landing page as soon as you’ve had it and the survey setup.
3. Finding the Pain Pattern
After you’ve finished analyzing the responses of your survey, you’ll have a list of people that you can schedule your first conversations with.
Always start by asking them to tell you stories about their jobs. This allows you to hear things from their point of view and really go deeper. Try to resist to directly ask them about their problems until you hear something that seems painful in their story. Most people find it easier to tell their stories than talk about the struggles they have.
The process that I just described is called “Customer Development”.
It’s important that you find out whether are really having the problem that you think they have or not or if they don’t care at all.
Finding the pain pattern across your target customers will help you in validating your idea. So, this should be the main goal you’re trying to reach.
Jobs-to-Be-Done
This is a great framework that will help you understand your customer development interviews as it provides a structure for realizing the common pain patterns that customers go through.
The idea behind it is simple: customers are using your product to do a job for them.
Always think “when I ……, I want to ……, so I can ……”.
You need to figure out what job people need done with your product. This will be done by collecting information in interviews and pulling out jobs from the conversations you have with them and creating a list of the most common jobs.
Crazyegg.com provides heat maps that will show you where visitors are clicking on your website from a jobs-to-be-done perspective. That way, once you’ve established the main job, you’ll be able to divide it into sub-jobs.