Need some advice on how to do market validation
Rishab Kokate
9 replies
So I have this idea for an app which is a team collaboration platform, and the niche I want to make it for is the small/medium sized healthcare clinics. I have built out a bit of it and tried to demo the app to a few of my friends who work in the medical field as Medical Assistants (MA). But I feel like I need more feedback so I have been trying to reach out to the healthcare clinics but no luck, not even a single response. Im so lost as to what to do next.
Replies
Iryna@ira_
How did you come up with idea? Thats the message you need to spread around: "Ive noticed that when do X the result is Y, and I have a possibility to make it Z. Do you think this problem with X could use a new approach?".
Share
Launching soon!
Talk to 20+ potential customers before building anything, and create a simple landing page to test if people will actually sign up/pay.
@simonas_kauzonas thanks, ill try and launch my landing page asap
So I don't know anything about selling to healthcare orgs, but from what I've heard, I imagine cold outreach could be pretty hard. Which is fine--in some spaces, cold email and the like just don't work as well. Of course, if I'm wrong, and this is a space where you would expect cold outreach to yield much better results, it could just mean your product isn't solving a real problem for healthcare clinics.
In any case, it seems like you already have some friends who either are your target customer or could introduce you to your target customer. Are they willing to pay for this platform? Or if they don't make procurement decisions, are they excited enough about this to introduce you to their boss or colleagues who do make those decisions? If so, leveraging your network for warm intros seems a lot easier if you're in a space where cold outreach is hard. If not, I'd want to figure that out (e.g., Is the problem you're trying to address just not one people are willing to pay to solve? Does your platform not solve the problem as well as you initially thought? Etc.)
Build Pad io
To validate your app, focus on reaching out to clinic managers and use your connections or LinkedIn for some intros and visiting local clinics in person might work better than just sending emails.
@marjianto74 @bensyverson I hadnt even thought about this approach, thanks a lot for the suggestion!
@marjianto74 Yeah this is the way. Rather than reaching out to clinics, use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to reach out to your actual end-users working at clinics. You probably only need to talk to 5–7 of them to understand whether your solution is solving their needs. Then separately figure out who is doing the software purchasing for small clinics, and reach out to those folks to understand pricing and gain confidence in your business model. Healthcare is a notoriously difficult market to break into, for a number of reasons. My advice would be to consider less-regulated, higher-margin adjacent markets, like Chiro, Med-spa, etc. They probably have more money to spend on collaboration anyway.