Launch your products with confidence, not risk. Here's how.
If you’ve ever launched a digital product you know that a validation of your product can be crucial to make things work out in the end and eventually reach success.
So did I. And I learned so many things on the way through all those mistakes. There are so many consequences of skipping a validation process. You might end up with wasted resources (your valuable time), damage your brand, and eventually, even miss market opportunities because you did not have an eye on the market.
The goal of this article, that you get confidence and validation for your idea so you are ready for a successful product launch. Let’s dive straight in!
Market Insights
Know your customer. Product validation is all about understanding the people who will buy your product. You need to empathize them. First, identify your target audience, aka your potential customers. Research what your potential customers need, what their jobs are, what trends they are following, and what you’ve got for competition out there.
Once you have enough insight into your target audience, it’s time to develop a few actionable instances that will give you the validation data you need.
Validation Experiments
Up to this point, everything has been speculative. You don’t truly know if your assumptions hold water. Now is the time to gather concrete data to support or refute your hypotheses. It’s a lot of different experiments you can perform to validate an idea. I recommend Strategyzer’s experiment library, which includes 44 experiments to test your business idea. I present a few of my favorites here:
Wizard of Oz
The Wizard of Oz experiment is a method to validate product ideas before fully developing them. In this setup, you simulate the functionality of a product or service manually behind the scenes, while the user believes it’s fully operational. This allows you to gauge user reactions and validate hypotheses about usability and desirability without developing it.
For example, a prototype app might display automated responses that are actually generated by a human playing the 'wizard' role. This method can provide valuable insights into how users will interact with the final product and whether it meets their needs.
MVP
Develop a minimal viable product (MVP) and present it to select members of your target audience. Think of this as a form of user testing—not of the user experience, but of the concept itself.
Social Validation
If you are building your products in public, you can over time build a community around your products. A community of hundreds or thousands of followers and engaged potential users/customers. If so, this is amazing, and you should use this power for validation. Post sneak peeks of your product and ask if they would use it (Don’t ask for feedback, we just want to know of it’s something they would like to use for themselves).
If you don’t want to directly ask, you can also rely on post analytics. How did the sneak peek post perform? How many likes, shares, and comments did it get? If it’s very high, the product has higher interest, which is exactly what we want. Check these numbers regularly on all you pre-launch posts.
Coming Soon Sites
In addition to qualitative research and social analytics, you should also set up a “Coming Soon” landing page that collects email addresses for you (Emails are still one of the most valuable datasets in marketing, don’t sleep on it). Find a website builder that are suitable for you previous know-how. From WIX or Squarespace as one of the simpler web builders to React templates in the other end. Both solutions should take you just a couple of hours to a day to set up the landing page. Make sure to enable analytics to track visitor behavior and interest levels.
Wrap Up
As outlined, there are straightforward steps to validate your idea and mitigate the risks of failure and potential brand damage. Test your concept, monitor social engagement, and establish a “Coming Soon” site to collect emails from prospective customers.
I hope this article helps you to launch your ideas with confidence!