Market validation is a crucial step in product innovation, as it helps you test your assumptions, identify customer needs, and reduce risks before launching your product. But how do you track your progress and measure your results? In this article, we'll share some practical methods and tools for tracking market validation progress, based on our experience and best practices.
Before you start validating your product idea, you need to define your goals and metrics. What are you trying to learn from your market validation? Who are your target customers? How will you reach them? What are the key indicators of success or failure? How will you collect and analyze data? Having clear and specific answers to these questions will help you design and execute your market validation plan more effectively and efficiently.
Depending on your goals, budget, and timeline, you can choose from various validation methods, such as surveys, interviews, landing pages, prototypes, MVPs, or experiments. Each method has its own advantages and disadvantages, so you need to weigh them carefully and select the ones that suit your needs and context. For example, surveys are quick and cheap, but they may not reveal the underlying motivations and emotions of your customers. Interviews are more in-depth and qualitative, but they require more time and skills. Landing pages are useful for testing demand and interest, but they may not reflect the actual behavior and usage of your product.
EXPERIMENT BY PRETOTYPING to VALIDATE… What is pretotyping? YOU FAKE IT BEFORE YOU MAKE IT ???. Check it out here … Pretotyping is a technique for testing hypotheses and validating ideas quickly and cheap, founded by Savoia. It involves creating a simplified version of a product or service to collect user feedback and understand market demand. It’s a non-working prototype. Pretotyping reduces the risk of failure by assessing market response early in the development process. A famous pretotyping story is how Tesla ‘faked’ their first electrical car, the Roadster, using a so-called ‘glider’ of a Lotus Elise to confront their potential customers with a ‘real car’, leading to 250+ launching customers who paid $ 5000,- in advance.
A validation framework is a tool that helps you structure your market validation process and track your progress. It can also help you communicate your findings and insights to your team and stakeholders. One of the most popular validation frameworks is the Lean Validation Board, which is based on the Lean Startup methodology. It consists of four sections: hypothesis, experiment, learnings, and pivot/persevere. You can use it to document your assumptions, design your experiments, record your results, and decide your next steps.
As you run your validation experiments, you need to monitor and visualize your data to see if you are meeting your goals and metrics. You can use various tools and platforms to collect, store, and display your data, such as Google Forms, Google Analytics, Google Sheets, or Tableau. You can also create dashboards and charts to show your progress and performance, such as conversion rates, customer feedback, retention rates, or revenue. Visualizing your data can help you spot trends, patterns, and anomalies, as well as communicate your findings and insights more clearly and convincingly.
Finally, you need to review and iterate your market validation process regularly and frequently. You need to evaluate your results and learnings, and see if they validate or invalidate your assumptions. You need to identify what works and what doesn't, and what you need to change or improve. You need to decide whether to pivot or persevere with your product idea, based on the evidence and feedback you have gathered. You need to update your goals and metrics, and design new experiments to test your new or refined hypotheses.
Market validation is not a one-time event, but a continuous cycle of learning and improvement. By tracking your market validation progress, you can increase your chances of creating a product that solves a real problem, delivers value, and satisfies your customers.