Have you ever had a revolutionary idea for a startup? Something you believed could change the world or disrupt an industry? Many people have these ideas, but unfortunately, not all of them succeed. One of the key steps to ensuring the success of your startup is validating your idea. Validating a startup idea involves testing its viability and potential before investing time and resources into building it. Here are some steps to help you validate your startup idea: 1. Identify the problem: Every successful startup starts with a problem that needs to be solved. Clearly identify the problem you are trying to solve. Is it a common problem that affects a large number of people? Is it a problem that people are actively looking to solve? It may not be the “sexiest” of ideas, so long as it solves a problem someone has. Some of the best startup ideas are simply improving efficiency for a widget maker by 10%. 2. Define your target audience: Defining your audience can happen in parallel or even before identifying your problem. You can always find your target audience and then discover a problem that affects this group of people. Defining your audience is simply asking: Who is most affected by this problem? Are they businesses or individuals? Understanding your target audience is crucial as it will help you tailor your solution to their needs. Defining your target audience can also help you find ways to distribute your solution. Keep this notion of how to distribute your solution in the back of your mind as you go through these steps. 3. Conduct market research: Before diving into your startup idea, do some market research to validate its potential. Look for existing competitors in the market. Are there any similar solutions already available? If so, how is your idea different or better? This will give you an idea of the market demand for your solution. Having competitors in the market means it’s a viable business. When I first started, I thought that having no competitors guarantees success but as I learned, this might just mean that it’s not a viable market. 4. Create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP): An MVP is a basic version of your product that allows you to test its functionality and validate your idea. Build a simple prototype or a landing page that showcases the key features of your product. This will help you gather feedback from potential customers and validate whether your idea solves their problem. This is the step many people jump to immediately and eventually find out that no one wants to use their MVP because they skipped #1-3. 5. Seek feedback from potential customers: Reach out to your target audience and gather feedback on your MVP. Conduct surveys, interviews, or run focus groups to understand their needs and pain points. This feedback will give you valuable insights into whether your idea resonates with your target audience and if there is a market for it. This is also a step to understand deeper how your solution can solve your target audience’s problem(s). Other valuable insight to glean at this point is how valuable the solution is. This can help you price your product further down the road. Oh, don’t forget to ask people how they would research solutions to their problem. This feedback/market research will help you solve the distribution problem I talked about earlier. These are just five points to get started with product validation. You’ll also need to eventually test different aspects of your product such as usability testing, product-market fit, price elasticity, and test CAC/LTV. You may have a perfectly viable idea, MVP, and fully functional product, but you may not be able to scale it efficiently to become a viable long-term business. We may go into more details down the road to go over ideas and ways you can test different aspects of your business/startup.
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Brian Leung is a seasoned marketer with 15 years of experience in digital marketing and 10 of which was focused in Google Ads and PPC. He’s worked with close to a dozen Fortune 500 companies and several well-known startups and ecommerce brands. He owns an agency called Treebud and an AdTech startup called SwiftAds.
He’s on a mission to help 1,000 small business owners 10x their business within a year. The legacy he wants to leave for his son is one of kindness and willingness to help others.
Company website: https://SwiftAds.io
LinkedIn profile: https://linkedin.com/in/bkhleung
Contact email: bleung@swiftads.io