For a B2B product - identify five people to whom you can honestly say: "You would be stupid not to buy this product" These should be real people you can name - not hypothetical people. If you cannot identify such people, but think they are out there, do everything possible to find them. Go through Linkedin and see who in your extended network fits your target market and find someway to talk to them. Email people or message people on blogs or social sites that seem to have the pain point you have identified. In reality, you will need to talk to far more than five people in order to narrow it down to five people who clearly need your product.
Once you have found a set of people who need your product, get their feedback on the idea, show a mockup or prototype, and ask if they would buy it. If a bunch of people say "yes", time to go build! But as you build, make sure you check in very regularly with potential customers, so that you stay on a the right track.
Keep in mind there is a big trap you must avoid in this process. Many prospective customers will be positive about an idea, but they overestimate their own willingness to get through the friction involved in adopting a new product. So the prospect says the idea is good - but then you build it, and they don't actually use it, because turns out email and excel had a bunch of hidden benefits that make them better than your product.
As an entrepreneur, you need to implore people to be brutally honest in their feedback, lest you build the wrong thing. You should focus more on identifying their pain-points than on pitching your own solution. You also have to make your own judgements about how big the pain point is, rather than just blindly trusting a prospect when they say they would buy your product. And you should to some extent reverse pitch - ("Did you think of solving your problem by doing X? Do you really need me to build a product to help fix this?")
I'm assuming its a computer related startup, but here are a few brief methods.
Website landing page:
- build a landing page
- explain the product and optionally post a mockup
- mention the price (optional but will give you a better proof of validation)
- collect at least an email address at the bottom
- optionally add a stripe checkout form (takes only a few min) and get some $
Kickstarter
Website or Shoppify or Etsy or Amazon stores:
- build one
- sell a trial run of the product
Physical product:
- Option 1: You can test on ebay or craigslist
- Option 2: Run one small ad in a magazine or newspaper
Bar method:
- Take the product(s) / apps to a bar
- Ask people to try it or offer to buy them 1 beer if they try it
- Try to actually sell it.
- Ask for feedback
MVP (Minimum viable product)
- Build only the basic features
- Build only a basic site
- Try to sell
- Lots more info on this out there
It would help to run at least some forms of advertising for almost all of these (sans ebay, kickstarter, and the bar method)
If you get orders you can't fulfill just say you are sold out and ask if they want you to contact them when you get more product.
If you have any others you care to share I would be interested to hear! Also good luck
This is a big question which can not be answered without knowing detail about you and your startup ideas. (In my opinion, B2B and B2C startups have totally different structure about idea and validating.)
When you think about your idea, generally tend to think about technology, product, development but generally this doesn't work.
(When Twitter first launch, most of people can't get their Twitter account. A big UX problem!)
(Beginning of something is totally different than already exist business.)
When validate idea, first don't too much focus on validating and speedly generate your prototype business. This business maybe your first sale or your first counseling.
Don't forget needed and optimal is very different. Everybody talks about their optimal but you should focus on your needed strategy.
I think all the methods listed by mc_hammer are great but nothing beats talking with your target customers and figuring out whether what you are building is a real problem. I will admit this is a lot easier for a B2B startup than a consumer startup but it has worked great for us.
One good route is to solve a problem you're experiencing yourself (or even better, one that you and some friends / colleagues are all experiencing).
It's how our startup came about -- we built something which did what we needed, and it turned out that a whole load of other people had the same problem (unsurprising with hindsight, but the point is we set out to solve a problem, not to "create a startup")
Happy to share more thoughts if you're interested.
Counterdote: One company I was with created a product to solve our own problem (time-tracking for projects) and while we loved it we did not find anywhere near enough other people to buy it.
If you're going to be building something anyway, even if there's no market for it, that's fine. If you simply assume that a given solution to a problem that happens to please a handful of geeks is going to please many, many more, you may be in for disappointment.
In retrospect we screwed up by not first validating the market for what we were so sure people would want.
A corollary here is that, for all I know, people would have loved the product if we pitched it to them correctly. Being unable to sell/market a good product is as bad as having a dud offering.
In any event it is far from a given that scratching your own itch means you have market validation.
I've become increasingly convinced of sales+marketing first, serious product building after validation of the idea and of the ability to sell it.
I second this approach. My current side project, a data analytics web service, born out of similar process.
1. I was downloading data on regular basis and manually analyzing data using Excel.
2. My wife wanted to analyze the same data but she didn't like my manual approach. And, asked me to automate the process, so I did and setup a system at home.
3. Then, she wanted to be able to remotely access the system at home. So I setup a VPN to access home system.
4. Then, some of her colleagues and friends wanted to use same system. So I setup a website with same system and user authentication.
5. That's how my web service evolved and currently has 1,000+ registered users.
Once you have found a set of people who need your product, get their feedback on the idea, show a mockup or prototype, and ask if they would buy it. If a bunch of people say "yes", time to go build! But as you build, make sure you check in very regularly with potential customers, so that you stay on a the right track.
Keep in mind there is a big trap you must avoid in this process. Many prospective customers will be positive about an idea, but they overestimate their own willingness to get through the friction involved in adopting a new product. So the prospect says the idea is good - but then you build it, and they don't actually use it, because turns out email and excel had a bunch of hidden benefits that make them better than your product.
As an entrepreneur, you need to implore people to be brutally honest in their feedback, lest you build the wrong thing. You should focus more on identifying their pain-points than on pitching your own solution. You also have to make your own judgements about how big the pain point is, rather than just blindly trusting a prospect when they say they would buy your product. And you should to some extent reverse pitch - ("Did you think of solving your problem by doing X? Do you really need me to build a product to help fix this?")