Zuster (2) — Problem Validation

This blog series:

This is the first of a series of blog posts about an idea for a product and startup which I have. I will share with you my experience and the steps I go through to evaluate this idea.

Outlook:

1. The idea
2. Problem Validation (this article)
3. Solution/Market Validation

Problem Validation

To recap, my problem space is around reading, saving and sharing news articles.

Hypotheses:

1. Receiving: I forget reading the articles my friends have sent me
2. Receiving: I do prefer to read long articles on my computer or tablet
3. Sharing: I find it painful to share articles with my friends on mobile
4. Sharing: I find it painful to share articles with my friends on desktop
5. Saving: I forget to read articles which I saved to read for later
6. Saving: I don’t read a saved article since it lost relevance already when I see it again

Since my idea is about sharing articles with friends, I need to analyze the problem from both ends: The person sending the article (sharing), and the person receiving it (receiving). On top, I am also investigating potential problems around saving article for themselves to read them later (saving).

Research methodology:

• Exploratory interviews: I started by doing 10 interviews in order to find out how people currently find, read and share online news. At this point, it wasn’t so much about validating my hypotheses yet, but rather about getting an idea how people generally consume news and whether I can identify any exciting insights which I did not think of before. The full interview script you can find here (https://docs.google.com/document/d/13IhHoCQ0Wq1mstL_NMRyxgnKSF9YBtVRINNGdK0IUnU/edit?usp=sharing).
• Survey: As a follow up on the interviews, I launched a survey which I shared with selected friends who fit my target user group. Obviously, I didn’t share the idea before with them so that there was no bias. I got around 50 answers. If you are interested, you can see/fill the survey here: https://forms.gle/e5WdndUyh3TPwWYr5.

My target user for the app is a mid 20 to mid 40 year old person with higher education who consumes news on a very regular basis. I will need to work out and define the user persona better still.

Results:

The interviews showed:

• Saving an article for later feels good. No matter if people read it or not
• Reading news is a way of procrastinating and boredom— similar to scrolling through Instagram or any other social media feed
• There are many different ways of keeping track of articles to read: Bookmarks; Keeping browser tab open; Notes applications (evernote, Google Keep); Sending email to myself
• Direct browsing on newspapers is only one part to find interesting reads, reddit, twitter and other aggregators were mentioned often too
• The device type did not seem to matter much

The survey focussed more on the defined hypotheses:

1. (Confirmed) Receiving: I forget reading the articles my friends have sent me

Take away: There are users who state they don’t have this problem, however, the vast majority clearly has this problem.

2. (Not confirmed) Receiving: I do prefer to read long articles on my computer or tablet

Take away: There is no pattern and people don’t prefer to read long articles on desktop devices.

3 & 4. (Not confirmed) Sharing is painful.

1 = Very difficult to share an article
5 = Very easy to share an article

Take away: Users find it very easy to share an article on mobile. Not so much on desktop but there is also no major pain.

5. (Confirmed) Saving: I forget to read articles which I saved to read later.

6. (Not Confirmed) Saving: I don’t read a saved article since it lost relevance already when I see it again

Take away: This was a bit surprising to me. In the interviews, I got quite a few statements that they have a growing reading list so I had expected that many articles become irrelevant.

Summary & Next steps

I got very powerful insights and got more clear on the problem I am trying to solve. Many friends wrote to me after filling the survey that forgetting to read shared articles is something they constantly struggle with which makes me think I am on the right track. However, this is also a very tricky problem space: While people agree that keeping an overview of their readings is difficult, they also say that sharing with others is easy. Hence, I need to find enough incentive for the sender to go through a slightly more painful process of sharing an article (compared with e.g. Whatsapp).

As the next step, I will review the current market and define a value proposition for Zuster.