How did you validate the need for your startup product?
Ram Ganesan
56 replies
When we started Sivi, we interviewed various user personas to assess their interest in using AI design tools.
When we presented the prototypes, we discovered that business owners and marketers showed remarkable enthusiasm about the product. This validation served as a strong motivation, inspiring us to move forward with the development of Sivi AI.
I'd love to hear your experiences and insights.
Replies
Frank Sondors@franksondors
Did many user interviews.
Sourced via cold emails using our own tech salesforge.ai , Slack Communities, Whatsapp groups, Discord and LinkedIn. As we will be dogfooding our own tech, we're also the intended audience of our tech, which makes product roadmapping much easier and reduces the likelihood of making wrong product decisions.
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@janine_nitz we recorded every interview, had also detailed notes, and then highlighted items we were willing to commit to as part of our early and long-term product roadmap. We use canny.io where the users to be able to file feature requests and then being able to upvote them.
You can use RICE model to help you prioritize: https://www.productplan.com/glos...
Also a friend of mine has built https://www.userdex.ai/ - check it out. Really powerful stuff.
@timcha 45 user interviews lasting 30 min-40 min not even showing wireframes or MVP.
Just a semi-structured interview recording nearly every interview.
Than once we had all the interview output digested, we built the MVP quickly knowing we will get rid of the code.
We did not show the MVP to users because I'm the intended user, so I was able to self validate. Also, it would take too much time to repeat the exercise post MVP launch.
We saw the impact of the MVP resulting in a huge relative lift in performance through our own testing.
That gave us the green light to proceed to shipping beyond MVP fast starting from zero again.
We released just yesterday closed BETA and I'm onboarding 10 companies today.
We conducted surveys and analyzed market trends to validate the need for our product. Our findings convinced us that there was a high demand for a user-friendly project management tool for remote teams, leading us to develop our startup.
@realvladgolub any reason you didn't do user interviews?
We built an MVP and before even paper prototypes to validate our core assumptions and did qualitative user interviews to get an idea of attitudes and opinions of our problem space. Without that, we would not have been able to build Liffery.
Liffery is launching today here on Product Hunt if you would like to support our launch :)
In general research is a great way to validate it, but from my point of view the MVP is the best way to learn about a need in the market
My co-founder needed it as he's in the field eh and that is a generic problem
Launching soon!
I think talking to industry experts and product wizards that has made innovative products before is the way to go. Interviews and surveys are often biased and more often than not gives false positives. Apple never does interviews or surveys for instance.
I put up an auto-based professional services ad-campaign online. Luckily we got a few sales calls. We're still getting them now from the Google Maps SEO
Combination of user interviews and DM's!
Calls sometimes paid.
DMing key people - Make a super simple single image or 30s video explainer!
In the creator space have also bought coffees via their links pre-asking for interviews / feedback. Always works!
Always get initial first impressions on your product and always identify their key problems and pains to ensure on track.
It was a big problem in my life, and would solve the exact problem in my life - ✅
Conducting approx 100 potential user surveys, I found 90% of these people had the same problem - ✅
While we build, utilising a waitlist with content marketing. Waitlist growing 20% or more every week - ✅
Build what others are doing but make it better based on personal usability. Guessing in most cases doesn't pay off. Better to look at what's out there and just do it better!
+1 to talking to users, nothing beats user validation of the problem.
In my case, I personally experienced the problem that my startup is solving. I was rejected from the credit card that I helped build at Visa - the Chase Sapphire Reserve!
Personal resonance with the problem meant that I could deeply empathize with users, and dogfood my own product.
I think another really good question is WHEN did you validate the need for your startup product.
As a venture builder at a startup studio, I see many startup founders spend months working on an MVP only to start validation too late (made this mistake myself as well).
Some products do not need an MVP at the early validation stages.
I had an idea, quickly created an MVP seeking feedback on the idea. It was very well received and had a good number of users. Now I just launched the second version of it.
In addition validate, discover, I use hacks of this type to ensure demand:
1) spy on the competition, buy several times and analyze the invoice number
2) obtain all the searches that are carried out on your idea and they are transactional keywords
3) listen , social listening and ask that people. Surveys, interviews, etc.
This is a tough question. From books, you do a ton of customer interview first.
If you have the resources to create a working prototype or even better, an MVP; I believe there isn't a better alternative
We will be releasing our MVP soon and so far it has been well worth the effort considering it has been the best source of motivation
Ours was a bit straightforward. When we started building Wylo - a community platform, we already had some players in the market. This was itself proof that there exists a need. To add on, we explored the current platforms, talked with some users, and understood the nuances of what can be made better and why there needs to be another community platform to fulfill the unmet needs.
For me, the first crypto startup I started in 2018 was a content business, because we saw the need and we personally needed something like that.
For my new startup OpenTools.ai I faced the same problem and then I approached all my entrepreneur's buddies and they said the same.
It's always the problem you faced, so you know more than normal market research.
write good sales letter, make one image and share stripe link! I built $22,000 B2B community in 1months in this way. No survey. no paid ad. Oh and I am building a virtual office tool for remote team's happiness. Would love to chat what you are building now!!
@jakeinsight050 excellent. are you able to scale to more users?