By Jon Lee
Lesson 1: The Who & What Questions of MVP Validation
Youre excited. You havent been this excited since your honeymoon and for a damn good reason. Youve got this amazing idea for a startup and you know its going to be the next big thing. You know it, your friends know it, even the old lady who lives the next block over knows it.
So whats next? Quit your job? Learn how to code?
First things first, learn to validate your idea.
Validation is a process to test whether or not your idea is likely to work and if that idea is even worth spending your time and attention on.
The concept of validation itself is pretty simple. You ask a few people here and there what they think of your idea and based on feedback, come up with a decision of whether or not you should work on it. The hard part about validating is actually getting meaningful results. Its really all about who youre going to ask and what questions youll ask them.
The Who
[su_pullquote align=”right”]To figure out who to ask, you need to define your target demographic. These are the people that will most likely find value in what you have to offer.[/su_pullquote]
Dont pitch friends or family. Friends and family are terrible people to ask when trying to validate your idea because theyre biased. Theyll likely support the idea even if its bat-shit crazy because to them, what they believe in isnt the idea, but rather you as a person. To figure out who to ask, you need to define your target demographic. These are the people that will most likely find value in what you have to offer. Identifying your target demographic is important because it sets the stage to start gathering feedback unique to that specific group.
Lets say youre building a iPhone app to schedule meetings??whos your target demographic? What kind of people are going to use your product? Realtors? Ice cream vendors? Librarians? You dont want to just say oh, anyone who wants to schedule a meeting because thats way too vague and you wont learn much. Take a realtor for example. What are core features that a realtor would want as part of the app? Maybe in-app directions, camera, and team syncing? What about a startup founder? Aggregated profile information, read notifications, meeting reminders? Different target demographics have different needs, so how do you know what you should build?
The idea is to define several groups of people (at least 45 people per group) who are likely candidates for your idea??it doesnt matter that much, as long theres some kind of logic to the type of target demographic youve defined because everything at this point is just an assumption. Your idea, regardless of whether or not it solves a problem youve been having is still an assumption that needs to be validated. Theres no point in overthinking things until you learn more and reiterate based off of feedback.
The What
The second part of what it means to validate is asking the right questions. If you ask people, do you wish your phone had a longer battery life? Well, of yeah of course. Most people would say yes because why wouldnt they?
[su_quote]If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.??Henry Ford[/su_quote]
Questions like that are useless because you dont actually learn anything from it. The kind of questions you really want to ask should be open-ended and draw from their experience. A question like, As a realtor, what is the biggest problem youve had when scheduling meetings? Would you mind showing me in person how you schedule a meeting? will be way more useful.
Let people take the wheel and show you whats missing. Its often solving problems that theyve already gotten used to that cause the greatest impact. (Remember how DSL used to be the shit?)
Why do you pay for XX product (competitor)?
What products have you tried (competitors) and why did you stop using them?
Focus on observing. Habits and patterns you recognize serves as the roadmap of what to build next, and more importantly, what not to build. If your MVP doesnt even have the basic features that theyve come to expect when scheduling meetings, could you expect them to find your product useful?
False Positive Bullshit
One thing to look out for are false-positives when validating an idea. Just because someone in your professional network shares your idea with their social networks doesnt necessarily mean its a product that they believe in. To them, sharing it might just be more of a polite gesture than anything. When you have a product that they really want, theyll want to give you their email. Theyll introduce you to people they know will need this product. Chances are, theyll be even more excited than you are because when you make something people really want, youre probably solving a huge pain point of theirs and thats validation.
Thats the best way to know if someones interested based on their enthusiasm. The more enthusiastic they are about your product and if whether they keep asking for updates even weeks later when youre still building the MVP, the more likely theyre someone who actually wants to use your product.
Jon Lee is Creative Director @getmwi, Founder at Rabbut.com.
This article was originally published on 45 Miles Per Hour.
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