How did you validate the need for your startup product?

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.

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.

I think talking to industry experts and product wizards that has made innovative products before is the way to go. Interviews and surveys are often biased and more often than not gives false positives. Apple never does interviews or surveys for instance.

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.

Did many user interviews. Sourced via cold emails using our own tech salesforge.ai , Slack Communities, Whatsapp groups, Discord and LinkedIn. As we will be dogfooding our own tech, we're also the intended audience of our tech, which makes product roadmapping much easier and reduces the likelihood of making wrong product decisions.

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.

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 :)

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

Ours was a bit straightforward. When we started building Wylo - a community platform, we already had some players in the market. This was itself proof that there exists a need. To add on, we explored the current platforms, talked with some users, and understood the nuances of what can be made better and why there needs to be another community platform to fulfill the unmet needs.

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

+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.

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.

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!

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/

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 - ✅

write good sales letter, make one image and share stripe link! I built $22,000 B2B community in 1months in this way. No survey. no paid ad. Oh and I am building a virtual office tool for remote team's happiness. Would love to chat what you are building now!!

LOL I literally just released a validation exam to do this for you, what are the chances you post this? Crazy Simple yes or no questions to ensure your niche is a good fit for you with 10 categories and 100 Questions

My co-founder needed it as he's in the field eh and that is a generic problem

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 :)

We conducted surveys and analyzed market trends to validate the need for our product. Our findings convinced us that there was a high demand for a user-friendly project management tool for remote teams, leading us to develop our startup.