How to find if your startup idea holds ground in the market

What’s the purpose of validating an idea? Not only do you stand to save a lot of time, effort and money, but also botched up expectations will hamper your confidence. The problem with most entrepreneurs is that they assume that they know what the audience wants, they think the sooner they start the better it is for their prospect and then there is the misconceived notion of first-mover advantage. One more reason which unfortunately takes the cake is that people don’t know how to validate.

If you have taken the trouble to discuss the idea with potential investors and customers, then you know you have a higher chance to succeed. It provides a reinforced belief, especially while seeking for seed funding, that customers will be are ready to pay money from their pockets for your product or service.

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Talk about your idea to people

Keeping the idea to yourself is akin to being in possession of the banned ₹500 and ₹1000 notes after the November 8 demonetization decree. Both are useless. Share your ideas with people who are part of the industry, with those who have failed in the same industry, seek opinions from people who have nothing to do with your startup. Try to get in as many different perspectives to work from. Your idea becomes refined and you get a clearer picture of what you have been trying to achieve.

Landing pages

For all your idea validation landing pages, you can use tools like Unbounce, LeadPages, etc. You can use these landing pages for different campaigns to see what works and what doesn’t. Install Google Analytics to monitor traffic and clicks. Have a pre-launch page with a message that describes what your company does and use it to gauge your customer’s interest.

Bring traffic to your site and test

Unless people know that you exist in the marketplace, there is no way that they are going to find you. Use either Facebook Ads or Google Adwords to bring in people to your site, whatever is the platform that you are going to use, make sure you give your campaign enough time for it to take effect. Target an audience that already uses your competitor’s products.

Create a persona for your customer

Trace a clear description of who you think is your potential customer. This is to understand what your customer does, what he/she buys, their spending capacity, in short, to understand their behavioral pattern. If yours is an app for furniture rentals, how would you create a persona for it? Who would your typical customer be? A young family in a Tier-1 city with disposable income should be the ideal case.

Analyze your competition

There are a million reasons to believe that your idea is not entirely unique and there might be varying prevalent forms of it in the market. It is mature of you to understand the demand for your product by seeing how the competition fares. Use tools like SimilarWeb and SEMRush to find out key competitors.

Before a product launch, product validation is an important step. Considering the fact that most startups fail to even lift off, validating your idea can be the biggest step towards avoiding an immediate failure.. There are other ways to validate your product too, this is an assortment of steps that you could follow.