A 3-Step Guide to Validating Your Product Idea
Discover if your target users will actually buy your product or service
A staggering 90% of startups fail largely because they make products that no one wants. -Fortune
Having taken hints from the Lean approach, founders and their teams have learned to “get out of the building” and talk with their target users, asking questions such as, “would you pay for this product?” or “would you use this app?” Unfortunately, these types of questions are often an ineffective and misleading approach. Humans are terrible at predicting what the future holds, and in which hypothetical scenarios they might do something.
Why it’s important to ask the right questions
What many founders really need to know is if their target audience — the persona in their heads — will actually turn into a customer or user. And they need to know this as soon as possible so that they can quickly adapt their product to better fit the market before the money runs out.
I once worked with a founder that heard nothing but positive feedback about her business idea. “The potential angel investor said it’s really smart!” But months gone by, she never did see a pay check from them. “A potential client that fits our market perfectly said he really needs a solution like this!” But many calls, texts and emails later, the client still hadn’t logged back in to use the website. Too often there’s a wide gap between what’s being heard and what user metrics show.
So how do you find out if your target audience will use your solution? There is no one-size-fits-all method, but if you listen carefully and ask the right questions, you can proceed to develop your idea with higher confidence. Here’s how:
Step 1: Focus on asking questions about past behavior
Step 2: Determine the magnitude of the problem you’re solving for potential users
Step 3: Weigh the costs for users to switch to and use your product
Step 1: Focus on past behavior
Your first goal is to discover if the problem your service is solving is even a problem for the user — in other words, determine problem-solution fit. Unfortunately, asking it outright will often simply get you the answer you want to hear, not need to hear.
People inherently don’t like letting others down. It can be much easier for people to tell you they’d love to buy your product than to tell you the truth. There are better ways to do this. To dive deeper, I recommend The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick.
On top of this, founders can instinctively put on their sales hats and end up pitching potential users on their products. Rather than pausing to listen to their needs, they make it even tougher for the potential user to tell them how they truly feel about their product. I recommend approaching conversations with potential users from a place of curiosity rather than conviction.
First you need to understand the context of your hypothesized problem.
Find 5–6 target users (Nielsen Norman Group) and watch them in their native environment. One founder I worked with had an idea to build tablet software designed to help visual artists flexibly present their work in meetings and on-the-go. In this case, she had to determine where to find visual artists to interact with in their usual work environment (perhaps in art studios, co-working spaces, and architecture studios). Think as varied and broad as possible!
She also noted any frictions or inefficiencies in their day-to-day tasks. Further, asking them to show how they use the different tools at their disposal — and most importantly — watching them use the tools live while measuring the effort needed. It’s important to approach this with a blank slate — pretend you don’t know anything about the topic, allowing you to assess the situation from an unbiased perspective.
If being in their native environment is not an option, consider remote hour-long interviews where they explain a day-in-their-life, ideally, while they are in the contextual environment your product is intended to be used in. Having at least some context is better than none at all.
Past behavior is a better predictor of future behavior than what someone says they will do in the future.
Then ask them open questions about their own experience.
The most effective way to do this is to avoid priming or leading questions. When the tablet software founder wanted to know whether her application could help visual artists better present their work, she asked architects questions such as “how big of a problem is creating interactive presentations using your current Powerpoint tool?” Unfortunately this is a leading question because asking “how big a problem” biases people to assume there must be problem, when in reality there might not be. Instead, try broader, more neutral questions such as “Tell me about your last experience creating an interactive presentation using your current tool. Can you show me how you would do so?”
To get an even more accurate picture, consider conducting experience sampling where you collect information about their experiences at multiple points of the day, live. All you need is a messaging platform (like WhatsApp) to reach participants with.
Questions about your users’ experiences will reveal whether the problem you set out to solve was indeed a challenge for them, or not. If it turns out that there were challenges and inefficiencies along their journey, then we move on to Step 2 to discover how painful of a problem it may be.
If no major challenges or problematic patterns presented themselves, it’s worth digging deeper. Perhaps increasing your sample size will reveal a wider spectrum of your users’ experiences. Or zooming out your questions to capture a larger part of the users’ experience will reveal rusty areas ripe for new solutions.
Users don’t have to recognize what solution might fit their problem — it’s our job to find a solution. But what happens if our target market doesn’t realize there is a problem at all? They won’t always spell it out for you. This is where spending time immersed with your target audience and observing them is key: is spending 5 minutes trying to format a 3-D model into a Powerpoint presentation really not a problem? To deep dive into more methodologies, I recommend Just Enough Research by Erika Hall.
Here are some sample questions…
To understand the frequency of an activity:
To understand how people go about completing an activity:
To usability test a solution (yours or another existing one), provide a specific task to complete:
If you’re interested in diving head-first into user interview best practices, there’s an aptly named book I recommend, Interviewing Users by Steve Portigal.
Step 2: Uncover the magnitude of the problem
Your first goal was to determine if the problem truly existed. Next, determine if the problem is a significant one — one that users find worthwhile solving. There are many problems that are perceived as significant from the outside, but when put to the test, a quick-patch, work-around solution is applied because the costs of taking up another solution just aren’t worth it.
In the case of the founder that set out to create presentation software for tablets, the artists and architects she talked to admitted that creating smooth transitions for 3-D models during a presentation was a challenge. The founder took that information and ran with it to her developer to start building out the presentation platform….not realizing that had she dug deeper, she would have discovered a more nuanced truth; the architects had already found a work-around using embedded videos.
The amount of time, money and effort (I’ll call these “user costs”) that a user spends on solving the problem is an indicator of the magnitude of the problem — and therefore how likely they are to try out your solution.
In this case, I went back and asked questions around how much their current solutions cost. “So you mentioned that it’s a hassle formatting your models in presentations…have you tried any alternative ways to solve this problem? (If yes), how many alternative ways? How often? How much time have you spent searching? How much did the solutions cost? How often do you use them?”
With diligent prodding and at least 5 conversations, you’ll discover how much time, money and effort your audience has spent on trying to solve this problem.
It’s possible that not everyone you speak with experiences any challenges for you to solve. And that’s fine — what you’re looking for is patterns. Are more than two people expressing similar challenges? This could be the lead you’re looking for.
Step 3: Weigh the user costs of the current solution against yours
Your solution needs to cost less than the current solution being used.
Since costs aren’t solely monetary, your solution should cost less in effort, switching costs, and money. For the architects, it made more sense to continue using their current solutions since it was 1) free to use 2) not really that big of a hassle and 3) ubiquitous — all teams and client computers already had the software needed to read their files.
The minor hassle of having to use the current workaround of embedding a video manually, outweighed the cost of switching and paying for new software. With this information, the founder was able to tweak her idea to create a service that provided more value to the user: an add-on for their existing presentation software.
One of many
These three steps are just some of the myriad ways to answer the question: “will people use my product?” There are various user research methods, design sprint frameworks, and market analyses that could also answer these questions, and enhance the confidence of the result. Explore the options, try a combination of approaches, and let me know which you find most fruitful!
I’m a UX Architect and Researcher obsessed with creating ideas, products and services that seamlessly sync with user needs. Based in beautiful Amsterdam and part of the team at MOBGEN | Accenture Interactive.
