1. Problem Vs Solution
The founder should be able to describe and measure the core problem. Besides, it’s important to know how many are facing the same problem and how they are currently solving them.
When it comes to solutions, it’s crucial to establish a clear and a distinctive value proposition. Vitamins are great but you need a “painkiller”. Opportunity size becomes smaller for “good to have products/solutions” rather than for “must haves”. It’s important to understand the product market fit before you arrive at a decision to take your startup forward. To better understand the product market fit the best way is to ask your customers.
2. Customer Surveys
Customer surveys are the best way to validate and pivot your idea if deemed necessary. You cannot build a solution that your customer don’t want and expect to sell the same to them. Identifying and segmenting your target audience would be a key factor to determine your customer persona. Having a customer persona will help you to think through their shoes and understand their pain points. It also helps you to ask right questions that should go into the customer survey form. Once you are ready with your questions, it’s time to hit the market. Direct customer surveys, digital surveys and customer traction and feedback mechanisms provide relevant metrics that would help validating the idea.
3. Face to Face Meeting with potential Customers
This will help identify the real-time insights of the customer behaviour and will help challenge the idea through various contrasting and constructive feedback
4.Talk to Key Opinion Leaders
Talking to experts other than your customers also opens up to novel ways of solving the problem. Having a long tail list of advisory team is important especially for tech startups that involve significant innovation. Feedback from customers and excerpts from KOLs are one of the strong validators to decide on proceeding with your idea.
5. Competitor Analysis
Identifying potential competitors who already exist in the operating industry space; and understanding their business model, customers (Customer segments), market, offerings, revenue streams, and their achievements would help map the startup idea’s standing with respect to its competitors. This would perhaps trigger the founders to brainstorm and come up with a Unique Selling Proposition to the target customers. Besides, interviewing CEO’s of competitive companies would greatly help in uncovering the execution challenges and validating the business model.
For an in-depth analysis of your start-up idea using multiple combinations of idea validation frameworks book an appointment with the author or visit https://www.rolandlam.com/
About the author
Roland Lamuel - https://www.linkedin.com/in/roland-ed-lamuel/
The hard part of starting up turns out to be the most passionate one for him. Yes, its the "Execution"
He is a well-qualified Entrepreneur who holds an MS in Entrepreneurship from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. He has multi-level business consulting and co-founding experience within global tech & deep-tech start-up ecosystems. He'd be a good match for founders who are looking forward to engage with an all-rounder who has more wisdom about starting up
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