Have you heard the saying “Build it and they will come” but is that for real? will your app go viral once you unveil it to the public? The answer is “NO”. A lot of founders waste a lot of time building their startup in stealth thinking that someone will steal their idea but once they launch it, no one uses it, all the time down in drain with no real learnings, we really want to avoid that. How? by validating our idea as soon as possible and in most of the cases before even building it. Yes, even before building it.
Here are ways you can actually do it.
- See if competitors exist
- Competitors? are you serious? yes, if your competitors exists in some shape or form and users are already paying for the service it means there’s demand for the problem you are solving and now your goal is to make it better? How?
- Comeptitors lacks good user experience: In recent years and with changing generations people are focusing a lot on good UI and ease of use (UX). See if your competitors are struggling with that and make something that simplifies that. Linear raised $35 million in the already crowded market of task management apps following the same principles. All the crowded industries are disrupted with changing generations.
- Competitors charge too much: Have you used typeform? They charge $99/m for something as siple as sharable forms and still have annual recurring revenue of $99 million. Yes, $99 million even when Google Forms does that for free. Abhishek saw the issue as people are openly talking about it on Twitter and Reddit and recently launched Youform, a Typeform alternative at $300 for a lifetime. Go through Twitter and Reddit every day and you will find tons of opportunities like this if you are looking for an idea.
- Competitor is missing key features: If you think about it, every Google product has created a space for a billion-dollar premium product. Google Docs and Notion, Gmeet and Zoom, Calendar and Calendly, and many more, why? the founders of these companies identified that a set of pro users who use these tools face recurring problems due to the lack of some features and are eagerly ready to pay. Boom, all of them are unicorns.
- Competitors have very complex tool: So a lot of tools evolved into a suite of products like Hubspot, Sproutsocial, and Ahref but a lot of times users don’t want so many products, and if they don’t want us so many products while will they pay complete price. This creates a gap for simpler standalone tools which does one thing but does it well enough to make users pay for it. Seostuff is a simple keyword research tool built by Yossi as a competitor to Ahref for those who just want to do keyword research.
- User Interviews: Identify your target audience and try to reach out to them. Either ask them to get for a quick call or share a set of questions with them. While preparing the set of questions to ask, make sure you never ask leading questions. try to make the conversation natural and ask follow up questions to them and never ask if you are facing this problem. the answer to such a question will always be yes. Keep the conversation as organic as possible.
- Hype up your product – Identify your core hypothesis (they can be multiple) and make a landing page talking about the problem and the product spread it on all the socials and see how many people sign up. Take feedback from these users and validate your hypothesis, if it doesn’t work tweak it until to validate it all. If you get enough users who are actually ready to pay, you have validated a problem and are good to go ahead to build an MVP as you already have some alpha believers to ask to. While making a landing page make sure it is not for a very vague user persona otherwise you will not be able to identify who’s excited.
- Make an MVP – IF you are building something where an MVP can be built within 1-2 weeks, what’s better than making the first version and giving it hands-on to real users. This is by far the best way to test out an idea but not recommended for any product that takes more than >3-4 weeks to build. for most of the problems it is very much possible to build a simple MVP by avoiding go-to have features, just making enough that the user can solve the core problem without the fluff around, if you see the traction, keep building and shape it into a fully polished product.