How much feedback is enough to validate your startup idea and start investing more resources?
Luka Kankaras
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Moritz Wallawitsch@moritzwallawitsch
Depending on the value of your product, one letter of intent might be enough.
You want people telling they want to / or better trying to buy your product.
I recommend this article on smoke tests: https://cxl.com/blog/smoke-test/
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@moritzwallawitsch uh, an awesome article, thx!
Dan's four step process nailed it:
1. Choose the right idea: Choose a problem you’ve experienced, choose something that’s a must-have (not a “nice to have”), choose something you’re passionate about.
2. Find customers using your competitor’s product and conduct validation research. Your friends will tell you your idea is great; people who are already paying to solve the problem you want to solve are the best choice.
3.Design 3 core features of the idea, not the entire product. What can you build in a 6-week product sprint vs. a 6-month development period?
4. Get your target audience to pre-buy the product. Work with them to develop the full product.
@luka_kankaras1 I think step 4 is important, especially for B2B products. When we’ve validated the idea, I used paid trials to test demand. Then we sent money back with a founders’ letter about our current stage info and product plan.
@irina_seng1 Thx! yep, probably the crucial one! Btw, I see some Big names on your website 🙌 Was that your target audience (enterprises) from the start? I ask because pre-selling the product to them might be even harder than to the SME.
Great question! you need to take an iterative approach here. Just spend enough resources to get to the next step. The build cycle at a high level.
Concept > Low Fidelity Prototype > High Fidelity Prototype > MVP Build
@bharatpasam yes, this makes sense, and along the way always listen to the market and collect feedback
That's a good question and the best answer is probably "it depends" ...
Step 1: Don't try to rely on your gut-feeling
Step 2: Get feedback from customer discovery interviews (there are good resources from Steve Blank and also the Jobs-to-be-done-framework is very helpful).
5 interviews are often referred to as all you need. I guess you need more but 5 interviews (if done properly ;) will tell you 80% of what you need to know.
Step 3: Get feedback from early users. Implement a feedback solution like i.e. Usersnap and collect feedback not only on the issues but also on the missing features and the needs & pains they want to solve with this feature.
If you build the process and flows for this feedback collection properly, you will get enough feedback to validate your startup idea or MVP.
@kmschremser Thanks! Is there a set of interview questions that worked best for you and that you could share with us?
@luka_kankaras1 Hi Luka, that's a difficult one, as it depends on your business.
1) Doing interviews is a profession. Spend time and learn how to do non-biased interviewing.
2) Try to get to the core of the need of your target audience.
3) Find out whether your target audience would really purchase the product. "Do you like this type of book? Yes. Perfect, I have some in my car, would you buy one right away?"
4) On our Usersnap blog, we are sharing a lot of knowledge on how to gather feedback from your users and customers, you'll find some interesting articles there.
https://usersnap.com/blog/custom...
@kmschremser these are really helpful tips! When try to validate new features, we try to do 6 interviews. Like you said 5 of them tell us about 80-85% of what we need to know to move ahead and the 6th one is to ensure we are hearing similar things still.
This is a great resource for that Luka -> http://momtestbook.com/
+ Product Market Fit survey. It's about asking your potential customers about the problems they have and the kind of solutions they’re looking for.
- Talk about their life instead of your idea
- Ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future
- Talk less and listen more
Make sure you:
- Ask when it last happened or for them to talk you through it
- Ask how they solved it and what else they tried
Follow-up questions to help dig into the underlying motivations:
- Why do you want that?
- What would that let you do?
- How are you coping without it?
- Do you think we should push back the launch to add that feature or is it something we could add later?
- How would that fit into your day?
In terms of numbers, I'd say the more the better but if there are no users or customers already and your audience is cold (customer discovery) I'd start with 10 interviews like this. Of course if you pay for surveymonkey software and they can send your survey to 100 participants, that will bring some significance to it.
We focused on Engineering and Design Managers.They buy product for their teams. Then we use product growth loops to grow horizontally inside company