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5 seconds to validate your idea

Vadim26

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I think the link you mentioned in your first post is broken
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MattPo

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I use this website: https://statista.com
and here is my hack:
Many statistics are accessible for free if accessed via the search engine from Google, but it is limited to 4-5 stats. (It's their foot-into-door marketing strategy). If I find a statistic on Statista which is blocked, I take its title + suffix "statista" and google everything in a separate incognito window. Sometimes I need to change my IP-address via VPN, Proxy or similar, to make it work.
 

Wolfman

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We see this weekly on the forum.

"Hey guys I'm new here, I had a great idea to sell widgets to custom picture framing stores!"
Hi Scot, That research site is good but not for validating my product. My product is a new application of an old technology. I've been reading testimonials/complaints about the "competition's" product to validate my product. It's a really fuzzy method but it beats doing nothing. I'm also taking concurrent steps to create the product/label/packaging...
I haven't set up a timeline because I have no idea of how long stuff takes. And the manufacturers/suppliers from India are unpredictable about getting back to me.
Please post any other ideas you have about validating a new product. Thanks again, Greg

Then we get the inevitable analysis.

"Well based on research, custom framing is being take over by craft stores like Micheals and Joann Fabric. There are only 1,200 operating in the country. If you could sell 2 widgets to, 10% that's only 240 widgets. I don't think your market is there."

Save yourself the headache of coming up with your billion dollar idea then finding out a market simply doesn't exist. Visit About Questia | Questia, Your Online Research Library

You can get a good overview of the market you're targeting for quick validation. If it passes this quick litmus test of simple numbers, then you can move on to more in depth market research and validation.


We see it time and time again. VALIDATE before you execute. There are plenty of current and former Fastlaners who made this mistake, learn from it so you can save yourself time and money.


*disclaimer: I do not own or have any connection with that website. It is simply a tool I used to evaluate the market for my business. I found it through Google search.
 

Scot

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Hi Scot, That research site is good but not for validating my product. My product is a new application of an old technology. I've been reading testimonials/complaints about the "competition's" product to validate my product. It's a really fuzzy method but it beats doing nothing. I'm also taking concurrent steps to create the product/label/packaging...
I haven't set up a timeline because I have no idea of how long stuff takes. And the manufacturers/suppliers from India are unpredictable about getting back to me.
Please post any other ideas you have about validating a new product. Thanks again, Greg

Validating a product is pretty well documented here on the forum, just search any thread about ecommerce, namely anything by @biophase

What I can say from experience is that the only real way to validate a product is through selling it. Try and get a large sample order and sell them to people, see if they'll vote with their wallets.

One thing I did to semi-validate my market was to put out a survey (with permission of the admins) on a large support group on Facebook. Within an hour I had over 120 responses. That convinced me for sure that people were ready to buy.

But it wasn't until I actually get sales on my website and Amazon that I really knew if the market was viable.
 
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jcvlds

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The way I think about it, Scot’s initial post was more geared towards validating the total addressable market, then estimating a realistic serviceable market, and finally your obtainable market that you could win.

Validating in this sense, to me, means more so ensuring that the market (potential customers) is large enough to go after.


On the other hand, validating your product/service is like Scot mentioned, ensuring that the demand or the need is strong enough that people are actually buying and not just entertained at the solution. I agree with Scot that actual purchasing is probably the greatest validation of just the product-market fit. However, you would probably still need to see some of your metrics in terms of conversions and won-closed-deal ratio to determine estimates of your obtainable market from the total addressable market.


Not sure if I’m explaining my thoughts well enough, let me know any questions or doubts.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 

Wolfman

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Hi JC, Thanks for talking about validation. I'm in the conundrum where I need a product in order to validate unless it's a purely hypothetical survey. Ex. "would you buy xxx if it cost yyy?" (That is tough w/ B2B products.) Anyhow, just thinking in terms of validation is a good practice. Thanks again, Greg
 

jcvlds

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Hi JC, Thanks for talking about validation. I'm in the conundrum where I need a product in order to validate unless it's a purely hypothetical survey. Ex. "would you buy xxx if it cost yyy?" (That is tough w/ B2B products.) Anyhow, just thinking in terms of validation is a good practice. Thanks again, Greg

Hey Greg,

I think every product and every market will be different as to how quickly or easily you can ‘validate’ it.

For your physical product, is your target buyer different than the end user of the product? What’s the problem the product solves?

I think it’s hard to really find a viable path to validating a product and a market without knowing more specifics. If you can share more maybe I can be a bit more helpful


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
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