When you have an awesome idea for a mobile app, it’s hard to contain your excitement and enthusiasm, especially when you can visualize the product’s potential.
You’re eager to share your idea with potential co-founders, friends and relatives.
But here’s a hard-to-hear truth. None of these people can give you realistic feedback on your idea or its true potential.
Sure, they can support you, and wholeheartedly believe in your vision, but what you need is realistic, truthful and unbiased feedback from potential users, professionals and investors. Real people who have real experience in the space you’re looking to enter with your product.
Defining user flows, outlining features, jumping into coding right away and wanting to launch as quickly as possible is normal. But rushing to launch without validating your product can kill your business before you might even get to scale it. Here at Tapptitude, we know that the tech industry is defined by the speed at which it moves. However, just like in real life, sometimes you need to pump the breaks and slow down to carefully examine your environment.
Here’s why product validation matters
So what exactly is idea validation? At its core, it’s a discovery process done to determine the true potential and value of your product, where you remain impartial and try to understand its real scope and range of capabilities.
The most common misconception is that a mobile product is validated over time—post-launch—but that’s false.
You begin the validation process long before you even decide to write the first line of code. When it comes to this business, it’s normal to live with a certain level of risk hanging over your head. Validating early helps you assess how great those risks actually are.
The success of your startup depends on your ability to determine early on that:
- there’s a market for your product to begin with, and if so,
- how high the demand is for the service you’re offering,
- how large the user pool could potentially get,
- and so on.
If there are no problems and inconveniences to fix or gaps to fill with your app, you need to regroup and figure out something better.
Many startups fail because they’re so focused on the potential of their idea, they forget to check if the problem that sparked that idea in the first place is actually a key market need that covers a sizable audience. They also need to determine if users will be willing to pay for the provided services.
You could have the most brilliant and creative idea ever, but if you skip the validation process before launch and your product bombs, it’s impossible to recover all the time, effort, energy and capital you invested.
That’s why the validation of an app concept is so important.
If your product gets validated, chances are that it’s going to survive its initial years and turn a profit down the line. If it gets invalidated, you spare yourself the wasted energy and money that would have been spent on building an app that would’ve tanked sooner or later.
From A to Z, Tapptitude’s Field Guide will guide you through the entire validation process
There’s a lot of talk about success stories in the tech industry, but very little about the process of what happens before you build and launch a product. That’s a gap we wanted to cover with this Field Guide because it’s a space that creates a lot of uncertainty. The idea of product validation might seem scary or hard, but it’s really not—in fact, it’s made up of a series of conversations you have with potential users where you listen with intent and some well-done desk research.
Keep in mind that you have to grasp how people perceive the problem you’ve identified and are trying to mend with your mobile app. You also have to put aside your enthusiasm to make room for their real experiences and critical feedback. What happens as you explore the problem space is just as important, even more so, than what happens as you define your product.
Only when you have a complete understanding of both the problem space, demand, and market size can you start seeing the space your product may take up in the routines and workflows of its users. Our Field Guide is a beginner’s guide to exploring the steps of the validation process. However, more experienced founders may find it useful to return to the basics, as well.
What exactly are you going to find in The Idea Validation Field Guide?
The Idea Validation Field Guide gives you all the tools you need to discover if you can confidently go full steam ahead into production, revise your idea based on feedback, and only then proceed into the development phase – or scrap your idea completely and pivot towards something different.
Learn how to define and know your core audience better, as well as how to avoid confirmation bias and draw insights from your interviews. In addition, the Field Guide will also teach you clever ways to validate audience segments and prioritise pain points with the use of surveys.
Last, but not least, you’ll be able to explore and understand the competitors and available alternatives in your problem space, to understand how your audience is currently solving the problem you’re addressing.
Erika Kramarik
Full-Stack Marketer
Erika is a full-stack marketer passionate about the intersection between technology and social impact. She mixes research with content design and a human touch to help people and startups succeed in delivering value through their work. When not writing or talking to people, you’ll find her reading or quoting Hamilton for any life situation.
