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How did you validate the need for your startup product?
When we started Sivi, we interviewed various user personas to assess their interest in using AI design tools.
When we presented the prototypes, we discovered that business owners and marketers showed remarkable enthusiasm about the product. This validation served as a strong motivation, inspiring us to move forward with the development of Sivi AI.
I'd love to hear your experiences and insights.
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@janine_nitz we recorded every interview, had also detailed notes, and then highlighted items we were willing to commit to as part of our early and long-term product roadmap. We use canny.io where the users to be able to file feature requests and then being able to upvote them.
You can use RICE model to help you prioritize: https://www.productplan.com/glos...
Also a friend of mine has built https://www.userdex.ai/ - check it out. Really powerful stuff.
@profy17 how many users have you interviewed? Did you iterate the demo with each sprint?
@timcha 45 user interviews lasting 30 min-40 min not even showing wireframes or MVP.
Just a semi-structured interview recording nearly every interview.
Than once we had all the interview output digested, we built the MVP quickly knowing we will get rid of the code.
We did not show the MVP to users because I'm the intended user, so I was able to self validate. Also, it would take too much time to repeat the exercise post MVP launch.
We saw the impact of the MVP resulting in a huge relative lift in performance through our own testing.
That gave us the green light to proceed to shipping beyond MVP fast starting from zero again.
We released just yesterday closed BETA and I'm onboarding 10 companies today.
@profy17 thanks for the detailed reply, we did something similar, conducted about 30 user discover interviews where we talked about the problem then another 25 user tests where we showed a prototype and iterated every 5 reviews
Combination of user interviews and DM's!
Calls sometimes paid.
DMing key people - Make a super simple single image or 30s video explainer!
In the creator space have also bought coffees via their links pre-asking for interviews / feedback. Always works!
Always get initial first impressions on your product and always identify their key problems and pains to ensure on track.
@janakg Absolutely, I bullet point the majority of comments in a google sheet then find themes and prioritise the key leaders and low/cost high value options.
I also encourage them to say what they really don't like about what we're doing to poke for possible true feelings.
To validate your startup idea, i.e determine whether it's worth expending your precious and scarce Founder Energy on, answer these four essential questions:
Is it pitch-worthy?
Is it join-worthy?
Is it earn-worthy?
Is it prepay-worthy?
A startup is a machine that turns Founder Energy into Cashflow from the sale of a tech-powered solution. The goal in validating a startup idea is to find out fast if the idea is a good use of your Founder Energy. Building an MVP or chasing VCs before you pass your startup through these four gates is failure mode and will resign you to the 90%+ of failed founder/startup/VC bets.
Passing your idea through these four gates will lead to startup success because you will know that your idea is attractive to a community willing to exert some effort to get access to it, either by earning access or paying for it. If you can convert your Founder Energy into cashflow at the idea stage, then congratulations! You have a startup worth pursuing.
If you can't, then just start again with the first gate, either improving your pitch for your idea or starting the validation process with another idea.
I built Slyk to make it easy to validate the answers to all four questions before you reserve yet another domain for a startup idea (or start looking for a co-founder, hiring a dev shop, or working on a VC pitchdeck).
Don't waste your Founder Energy building MVPs no one will use or chasing VCs who don't want to talk until you've validated your Startup idea!
In general research is a great way to validate it, but from my point of view the MVP is the best way to learn about a need in the market
I put up an auto-based professional services ad-campaign online. Luckily we got a few sales calls. We're still getting them now from the Google Maps SEO
We built an MVP and before even paper prototypes to validate our core assumptions and did qualitative user interviews to get an idea of attitudes and opinions of our problem space. Without that, we would not have been able to build Liffery.
Liffery is launching today here on Product Hunt if you would like to support our launch :)
I had an idea, quickly created an MVP seeking feedback on the idea. It was very well received and had a good number of users. Now I just launched the second version of it.
Worked on particularly two things.
MVP and Feedback Look.
We built the MVP pretty fast for our flagship product. Which was academy to teach nocode technology. Focused on Bubble.
We iterated over 6 months and gained more and more info on how the customer wanted to learn Nocode tech.
Helped us gain a lot of traction. Now focused on taking it to the next level.
It was a big problem in my life, and would solve the exact problem in my life - ✅
Conducting approx 100 potential user surveys, I found 90% of these people had the same problem - ✅
While we build, utilising a waitlist with content marketing. Waitlist growing 20% or more every week - ✅
I think another really good question is WHEN did you validate the need for your startup product.
As a venture builder at a startup studio, I see many startup founders spend months working on an MVP only to start validation too late (made this mistake myself as well).
Some products do not need an MVP at the early validation stages.
@forward_notion yes or no questions sounds interesting. Would 100 makes sense?
For me, the first crypto startup I started in 2018 was a content business, because we saw the need and we personally needed something like that.
For my new startup OpenTools.ai I faced the same problem and then I approached all my entrepreneur's buddies and they said the same.
It's always the problem you faced, so you know more than normal market research.
Early betas of our product had a free trial to get people to use it and give feedback, then at some point we got rid of the free trial and said no, this is valuable, you have to pay for it. And people did. That's when we knew we had something really worthwhile.
+1 to talking to users, nothing beats user validation of the problem.
In my case, I personally experienced the problem that my startup is solving. I was rejected from the credit card that I helped build at Visa - the Chase Sapphire Reserve!
Personal resonance with the problem meant that I could deeply empathize with users, and dogfood my own product.
Personal experience - I got tired of asking people "what payment app do you have" and selfishly built it for myself and my Gardner whom I paid. Out of no where over 70k people signed up without me promoting it. https://www.paylinkz.app/
We are making a presentation designer. We conducted interviews with business owners and managers. We chose cool colors for modern design. And then, at the interview, we hear from the guys that even though we have a blue color, but the wrong shade. At some point, we started hearing it all the time (often). Now we are making a color picker :)
Hi Ram,
Have you heard of book Mom test by Rob Fitzpatrick? Please take a look at it.
Secondly, how many people did you interviewed? How did you pick the sample data?
There are several ways to validate, one if them is what you did with large sample data.
Looking into competitors, and testing your poc.
@suyash_adhikari yes, i know the gist of this book. I interviewed around 220 people, different personas and for some sent sample mock workflows. Primary focus was to find who has this pain point acute
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