Initial market research plan for a SaaS tool, would you add anything?

[miguelst]

I have a SaaS idea that I want to validate, before starting to build anything (which is difficult as a developer, it's always itching to get going! But not this time, I want really thorough market research). These are the ideas I got.

Initial research

• Create a list of questions, question about the problem
  • Have you already had this problem? How is it affecting your business etc.
  • I won't talk about my proposed solution, only listen for the problem
• Arrange 10 video calls with people from my network or close network, to go over these questions
  • I will add that the findings will be written in a blog post, and I can include the interviewee's details, it could get them some website visitors or network opportunities
  • I will add that I'm going to select 4 "Early advisors" that get free access to my solution, and can help shape it.
• Re-arrange the questions based on my findings and feedback from the video interviews
• At the same time: Send out a message to a few people on Twitter and Reddit, "“Hi - I’m working on a startup idea and I have a thesis that [...]. Is this is a problem for you or anyone you know? Would you mind giving me some feedback?”
• Use the above to send out a digital Survey (more people), I'm going to use a Loom video to request/invite them to this, to add a personal touch.
• Time for my own research: Look for competitors, alternative solutions

If all goes well and I found a problem

• Create a sales deck with screenshots
• Create a prototype
• Setup a landing page and gather e-mail addresses, with a waiting list

That's the idea for getting started, is there anything I'm missing?

 

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[circleme]

Have you already had this problem? How is it affecting your business etc.

That sounds like you are the one who has the problem. Most of the time, that is a big red flag, as you can be biased quite heavily. The only thing that matters to me nowadays are the problems of my potential, future customers (plural, not singular). If only one person has the problem, it might be worth investigating/researching a little bit more, but most of the time, you want to see the problem multiple times or hear from many people who complain about it.

Everything else you are writing was my route as well:

1. Niche finding
2. TAM analysis > should be big enough so that if I convert 5% of the TAM, I'm still in the five figures MRR
3. Problem finding
4. Creating an MVP with only 1 feature so I'm able to fail faster if they don't like it and move on to the next idea
5. If they like what you provide, you still don't know if they are willing to pay for the feature or the final product. Most of the time, the feature alone is not enough value to get a paying customer/subscriber. (Just my experience)
6. Customer feedback, Customer feedback, Customer feedback...

At this point, I'm improving my product based on user feedback from MVP to MVP+. What that means is that I'm starting to feature-gate quite a bit. Depending on B2B vs. B2C (I'm only B2B), I'm providing the feature gate through freemium, obviously.

But the key takeaway from my post is that I would never start with my problem. I guess that there are a lot of people disagreeing with me on that point, as it is quite possible that many other people have the same problem as I do. However, I don't want to pursue something where the possibility of getting a huge me-bias is incredibly high.