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So you’ve got an idea for a startup but don’t understand if it’s worth pursuing. According to Statista, approximately 65% of startup founders find that they fail within the first 3 years of launch. This is a scary figure for any new business owner, however, you can quickly avoid this scenario by ensuring you checked your idea from the beginning. Whether you’re the creator of a first-time startup or have multiple organizations in your portfolio, every new venture ought to offer a solution to problems worth solving. This guide will go through how to check a startup idea, including validating tools that can help you in this process.
Why is verifying your startup idea is so important?
A startup failure is a lesson learned, however, if you can avoid running your service into the ground right from the start, this is undoubtedly a great way to start. The goal of idea recognition is to guarantee that your company design has potential. A research study by CB Insights reveals that the top reason for startup failure is the lack of demand for the product.
Business Plan vs. Idea Validation
Let us start by saying that the standard suggestion for launching a startup is to write a business plan. However, the business plan is all about execution. The assumption is that you have a validated solution, and the business strategy is how you plan to create a business to get people to buy your key. When a person has an idea for a new service or product, the first step is not to define how they will implement their concept but to validate if they have a problem and, more significantly, want to pay for a proper solution. Did you understand that product-market fit is among the most typical reasons that organizations fail? Even if you believe everybody will love and pay for your app does not mean it is true. Therefore, the very first question should not be “how do I implement my concept? but “what do I need to learn to validate that the problem is read and clients are ready to pay for my solution?”
Rather than writing a business plan as the primary step in setting up a business, my guidance is to follow the lean-startup process and do a bit of validation testing on your company idea and service first. So whether you start by producing a business model canvas to define and verify your company idea so you can tease out all your leap of faith presumptions or you simply have a nugget of an idea and do not know where to start, you need to begin the procedure by verifying your business idea first. It is far better to learn early that you require to change your solution before investing time and money on a service idea that nobody needs.
Your concept might solve an issue, but you will not make any money if there’s no market for it.
Any idea-based startup requires to target customers who want to pay money for your services or product while resolving genuine problems that matter to them. Your target market requires to care sufficient about your service to convert them from capacity to paying clients. Your ultimate objective is to retain and make them devoted clients. Startup idea validation is the procedure that begins with your embryonic plan, acquires a stamp of approval from the market, and ends with a happy consumer base. Let’s look carefully at ways to confirm your startup idea and some common idea validation platforms.
Conduct Market Research
Marketing research is about figuring out the viability of your product ideas. It involves gathering info on the target demographics, particularly about the customers’ needs and how they look for the details to affect their purchasing choices. In addition, conducting marketing research permits you to define trends in the markets and the problems that clients are dealing with. Besides customer validation, you’ll likewise need to carry out a research study on your rivals. If you can’t access your rival’s app, you wished to test, head over to their Help Center. Opportunities are, you’ll discover some screenshots and explanatory videos that might be useful.
Start with Google
It might sound apparent, however, such simple and trivial things are frequently overlooked. Take a couple of evenings and try to find some info on similar businesses, search engines, find similar subjects on forums, or even look for them on YouTube. Discover if someone has done something similar before. Was their effort successful? If not, check what they did wrong and how you can avoid similar errors. Browse the associated specific niches for any examples that might be useful to you as well.
Make Sure the demand Does Exist
No need on the market is the main reason why most startups fail. You have to be sure you will fix a real problem with your startup, and this issue matters for a sufficiently large number of people. To rapidly estimate if your idea will potentially need the market, you can resort to the services examining search query data. Each of them has a similar operating concept: you go into keywords and get statistic data on them, check dynamics, and similar search phrases. To evaluate your startup idea for demand potential, We recommend you to use the following tools:
- Kparcer.com
- KeywordTool.io
- Ahrefs keywords generator
Preparing Proto Personas
Proto personas are different from the basic personalities used in identifying the target audience of a product. While the latter involves substantial research, the proto persona takes a more low fidelity and ad-hoc approach. The process of producing proto personas is based on the intuition of the team members. To select the best people, you ought to ask, “What needs does our target market have?”. As the proto personalities are not built with research study, they require to be updated when more tests are carried out to represent the users of your product better.
Ask Possible Target Audience
Never ask your pals or acquaintances about it. They might offer you biased answers only, and a sample like this is not large enough. You have to ask those people who might be your future buyers. To do so, you can create an opinion poll in a thematic group on a social media network, begin a thread on an online thematic forum, or use the Quora.com question-and-answer site. Random people will supply you with better feedback. Besides, if you have an adequate budget plan, you can order a study conducted in focus groups arranged by analytic data companies.
Have a great idea but don’t know where to start?
Want to be next on the list of extraordinary ideas but are afraid to pick the correct tech pattern? Or are you afraid to fall with your vision and end it like that? Put your sorrowful worries away and book a free Product Development Strategy Session! We are an experienced and professional digital firm that supports and assists different start-ups. We guide them through the development procedure from point A to point B breaking down every step. Our specialist discusses the development priorities and supports their innovative idea. So what’s holding you back? Leave a short description of your distinct idea or a task on our very first and free advancement action: Product Development Method Session. And we’ll contact you in no time!
Study your competitors
No matter how unique your business idea is, there are possibilities that somebody else has already thought of a version of it; it all comes down to the execution of your business idea. Start by not simply looking at your competition but by finishing a thorough market analysis of their items to learn how to provide something much better. Think about ways to improve their offering and recognize gaps you can fill. Watch on their social media; users are most likely to air their grievances and post reviews for your rivals, so use this to your benefit. Learn from their mistakes and adopt similar strategies to develop your startup successfully.
If you have never developed such items before and have not worked in the target-specific niche, you will most undoubtedly discover people to peep on and find out something intriguing from them. When you study your rivals, you will know how other companies in the industry resolve similar problems and what you can borrow from them to adjust them for your start-up. Even a simple search in the App Shop and Google Play will enable you to find many fascinating things.
At this point, you need to remember and follow 3 easy guidelines as follows:
- Never attempt to prevent competition entirely. In places with no match, you will more than likely earn no income.
- Contemplating on a concept, analyze the already formed people’s needs. Think about how you can please them quicker, in a more straightforward method, or less expensive.
- Do not duplicate any existing startup.
You can develop a startup in a highly competitive market, carrying out a distinct idea at the same time. Everything depends on your approach to product implementation, the value you supply to your audience, and how effectively your product resolves their problems.
Read more: How Your Business Can Fail Without Proper Competitor Research
Launch a Coming Soon Landing Page
You can do it even without MVP, all you need is to comprehend how you see your future product. You will need to invest a bit in advertising, but this type of evaluating your startup concept will ensure your greater confidence in the importance of the item you are about to produce. To conduct such testing, follow the algorithm below:
- Register a domain.
- Make a landing page on WordPress or any other website builder, explaining the project and publishing pertinent images.
- Include a form for users to leave their email if they want to get informative letters on the product release.
- Connect web analytics and launch an ad campaign in Google Ads/Facebook Advs.
- Analyze the outcomes and conclude.
There are many websites you can use for this. You can begin by signing up a domain and producing a whole web page with item details, images, and a list of benefits.
Insert a feedback type into your landing page to collect insights, and think about adding a ‘subscribe now’ button to begin collecting prospective customers’ contact information. It might even be worth checking out complementary methods to market your business online to determine how your potential client base may respond to your idea. As a bonus, once you effectively verify your startup idea and manage to launch the product in the future, you will have a ready database of your future clients’ email addresses.
Finally, Find Out How to Earn Money on It
Even the brightest idea may fail if startup founders do not know how to earn money on their product. You need to understand how to monetize your startup, what the prospective market size your item has, and the number of paying clients you have to bring in to reach a break-even point a minimum. Study how other businesses generate income on their products and examine whether your target market is solvent enough. You may require to insert the monetization function in your future item as a kid at the initial phase of its development.
Always Start with Product Development Strategy
This is the first step towards creating A. Product Development Strategy assists you to evaluate your startup, get feedback, and gain experience at no charge. Consequently, its advancement should be your next step after considering your idea with startups and ensuring that it deserves an effort.
If what you’ve read is just like that, then JetRuby has something for you. As we’ve been on the digital market for more than 10 years with many startups, we felt their anxiety and doubts during the development cycle. For that reason, we have developed a technological flow that can potentially cast all of your worries away, and it starts from the Product Development Strategy Session. It is a free business consultation where your team and ours will create a general plan covering the future product cycle and an action plan with high-level features for your first steps. Got interested already? Leave your short project description, and we’ll be in contact with you within 24 hours.
