Validating Your Business Model
Excerpt from Innodev Technologies, “The Definitive Guide To Building Your Own Innovative Software Product”
Many young entrepreneurs come up with good product ideas and successfully build a good software product for their business. But many are impeded by their victory in developing the product, and forget the aftermaths. They might be convinced that their product is a success and end up assuming a lot of things about it, which in fact isn't true in most cases.
That’s why you need to validate your business model once the product has hit the market. Business model validation will help you correctly value your product and build a successful marketing plan for the same.
Here are a few steps that guide you through the validation process:
1. Promote your product
Once the product is built and ready to hit the market you need to start spreading words about it. This is where marketing and product promotion comes in. You can try various online and traditional marketing methods; or even combine the two to promote your product.
Here are a few ideas about how you can easily promote your software product and create good product reach among your audience:
Send out Emails & Newsletters — Start sending personalized e-mails and newsletters to your potential customers and make them feel close to your product.
Exploit the Social Media — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and many other social media platforms are the best places to advertise your product for free.
Advertise through digital signage — Lease small, medium, or large digital signage depending on your marketing funds and promote your product on the go.
Product specific blogging — Blogs are great ways to entertain and educate your customers. Write up blogs, website contents relevant to your product and customer requirements.
Write up press releases — Many new news platforms look out for interesting information about their relevant community. Draft a product press release and get it published through them.
2. Value your product/service
Building great software products or services alone will not help you standout in the business market. You should also give them the correct price value. You must understand your customers, competitors, and the business market well before you go about fixing a price value for your product.
Before putting a price tag on your product, make sure that it is affordable by your target customers and at the same time profitable to your business.
Here are a few questions to ask yourself before pricing your product — What is the value of my product from a customer’s perspective? How much does an average customer be willing to pay? How much does it actually cost for developing and delivering my product? What is the pricing range of my competitors? Does my product have any unique trait that holds greater market value? and more.
3. Record the user feedback
Your overall marketing and promoting activities will have reached a lot of potential customers and they will also have purchased or installed your new software product. It’s very much essential to get to know about what they think about your product and as well as your marketing strategies.
Get to know what exactly is driving the customers to like/dislike your product and categorize them accordingly.Read your customers response in the social media and analyze how far social media presence has helped in your product promotion.
Try to include various factors like, accuracy, availability, speed, size, and more to the customers’ responses. Particularly look out for negative feedback. This will explicitly tell you about why your customer dislikes your product and how you can improve on it.
And finally, always use your real-time user analysis report to bring in changes or improvements to your product.
4. Continuously improvise the process
When it comes to improvising or adding new features to your software product, your entire team will have their own opinion.
The development team would want to switch to some latest development tools. Your customer support team wants to create their own chat bots. Sales and marketing team will have plans for adding some flashy tools for their promotion purposes. Oftentimes, you end up deciding the winning feature, even before the battle is on.
It’s highly probable for one important voice to lose this battle: your customer’s.
That’s where the process of continuous improvement comes in. Over every iteration and feature release of your product, the customers will have their own likes and dislikes. You must continuously lookout for how they take your updates.
Do they like it? Is it better than the older version? What’s their feedback?
Ask the above questions to yourselves to understand their response. Depending on their feedback, you can plan your next feature update for the product and continuously improvise the same.
To read the complete start-up guide, check out our e-book, “The Definitive Guide To Building Your Own Innovative Software Product”
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