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What Is Validation and Why Should You Care?
Do you have a new idea for your business? Are you trying to imagine how consumers would react to your new product? Are you unsure if your new service is a good fit for your target customers?
If so, you should consider market validation.
It is a way to gain a deeper understanding of how your product or service is perceived in the market and more specifically by your target customers. It will help you test whether it fits with customer needs and whether it can relieve pain points customers have.
What’s in it for your business?
By investing in a compatible validation process, you will define opportunities for improvement and find out which of your ideas are worth acting upon. This also means it will help you filter out the ideas that aren’t worth investing time and money in.
Don’t let us convince you to use validation, let the numbers speak!
Win-Win for your company’s profitability: save resources, create buy-in, and instill confidence among investors or crowd funders if you require funding.
But how do you get started?
During the validation process, you will confirm your value proposition and its different components.
First off, you will need to define which assumptions you have about the new business idea. Then your most essential assumptions should be converted into, for example, 3 to 4 hypotheses that can be tested in the market to validate your business idea.
TIP: In the first stage, Search Engine Research can help you confirm whether people are truly looking for an answer to a specific problem you’re trying to address.
Now it’s time to run experiments on your hypotheses, find out below some of our chosen types of validation.
Include real users for real input
What better way to test your product or service than getting input firsthand from the end user?
In one-to-one interviews, you can find out whether your product or service truly resonates with the end user. The key here is identifying key customers to interview or even to test your product or service.
You could also go a step further and involve a key customer early in the development process. Find out what is important to the customer before, during, and after making use of your product or service. What are the customer’s pain points and what is the customer trying to achieve? Chances are that the validation will go smoothly because you’re using customer insights firsthand in the creation phase. We would recommend this method, especially in a B2B setting.
Nice extra: it can also help build a relationship with your customer.
A win-win situation if you ask us!
Prototyping as a key method of validation
Before executing the full roll-out of your business idea, if possible, make a prototype to test usability, customer reaction, and compatibility. There are many different options when it comes to prototyping, make a choice depending on what fits your business idea.
You could create a physical prototype, an online wireframe of your new website, a clickable app mock-up, or create a virtual simulation of what the product or service will look like.
TIP: When testing prototypes, we advise you to only test the key feature(s), to make it as simple and clear for your user as possible. The aim is to validate your core value proposition and not confuse users with unclear messages.
Test your new proposition online
Another useful and quick way to validate your concept in the market is through online ad testing. By monitoring click-through rates and conversion rates of the online ads you can gain insights into market traction and discover which features of your offering are most appealing.
If you’re torn between different variants of your idea, you can conduct AB-testing. This method aims at identifying which variant of your proposition performs best by creating tests for each and looking at the best performance.
AB testing can take on different formats: 2 different subject lines in an email newsletter campaign, 2 different core messages displayed on your landing pages, etc. Once again, it is useful to look at which variant has the highest conversion rate and clickthrough rate.
We hope these types of validation have inspired you to get started on validating your new business ideas in the market.
Do you need some extra help validating your new business idea?
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