What is the best method to validate product-market fit for an App or SaaS Product?
If you are a startup or someone with just an idea and not a lot of money or resources then Lean Strategy is one of the best frameworks for product validation.
With a Lean Strategy, you can move swiftly towards your product building process, and that too with fewer resources.
Let’s Check Out The Four Distinct Stages Of The Lean Product Validation Process:
1. Validate The Problem
Your first job is to find if your solution is a genuine one, no matter how confident you are about your product idea. For doing this, you need to speak with your potential customers.
It’s always better if you target a small number of people and check where the problem exists for them. Then you can later optimize and verify this with a large number of users.
The things that you learn from these interviews will make you more confident about carrying your product idea forward. Also, you will be able to see the underlying problems and work on them.
There are 3 techniques that you need to follow for validating the problem:
The first technique is to find at least five existing users who are very keen on using your product.
Although it does not guarantee the fact that your product idea is a good one, it is one of the simplest ways to start validating the problem that you have identified.
If you can build a good bond with these five users at least, then you can be sure that your product idea is a worthy one.
The second technique is to interview people so that you can know if your product needs any changes or improvements.
This way, you can cross-check if your product idea is addressing the needs of your users.
The third technique is to go for ethnographic research.
This kind of research involves observing the natural living environment of users to know more about their behavior.
In a greater context, this type of research helps you in understanding the user experience in a better way.
2. Validate The Market
So, finally, you are done interviewing your users to identify the problem.
The next step is to make sure that your market is big enough to move the product idea further. You need to collect all the possible market information, to make a rough estimate of the size of your target users.
You can even figure out the approximate price structure of your product. For validating your market, you also need to do deeper competitive research.
You need to find out what your future competitors are doing to solve a similar problem. If your focus is on the micro-market, then focusing on just one or two competitors is enough.
But if you are focussing on a larger market, then look for more.
To perform an efficient competitive analysis, check their social media profiles, blogs, about their team, and product pricing structure.
Check everything possible!
3. Validate The Product
Building a prototype is the best way to validate your product. For building a prototype, you don’t need to be a technical person. Be creative while you prototype.
You can keep the process lean by choosing the best prototyping techniques. Identify the purpose of your product. Know if it’s providing a solution.
Look for different ways of testing it on your users. Only after that, you can develop an MVP.
4. Validate The Consent To Pay
You can never guarantee the fact that every other person within your reach would love your product idea.
To keep you away from nagging them, they might say that they will use it. But in reality, most of them are not even interested in your product idea.
Your product may have huge market demand, but how many of them are actually willing to pay for your product?
So, for validating the willingness to pay, you need to build a website that will explain all the aspects of your product.
What you need to do is to highlight the exclusive selling points of your product, and address the key concerns that the users had while testing.
You can also set an option of pre-ordering by applying offers based on the customer’s purchase.
Check Google Analytics to track how people are interacting with your website.
The aim of this lean strategy of product validation is to cut down the cost and time by maximizing the chance of a successful launch.
P.S.
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Thanks,
Ritesh Osta
I help tech & online businesses scale fast.
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