Ever wondered why most businesses fail in the first year? They thought they didn’t have enough capital or weren’t experienced enough to start a company.
I’m not going to lie to you. It may be challenging, but the truth is that 80% of business ideas fail in the first year.
Are you a first-time startup inventor willing to turn the world upside down with your ideas? Planning and thinking you don’t want your business to fail is the survival of the fittest Minimum Viable Product.
Your goal is to be one of the profitable 20% rights. If you undergo confusion about where to begin, you’re not alone. Most projects fail because of not using frameworks before starting or launching their business. It’s called idea validation.
What Is Idea Validation?
Idea validation is the method of testing business ideas to know their viability.
It helps to verify the market need and the target audience’s readiness to buy your products.
Validating your idea early in the entrepreneurial journey is necessary because it ensures you don’t waste time and resources developing a product that won’t be valuable for consumers. Ensuring market validation can also introduce confidence among investors, business owners, and banks considering funding your startup.
Most founders or startups who choose to bypass the process and don’t analyze if their potential consumers want to buy a product fail too fast. This lets you discern the market situation by protecting you from commencing meaningless and unwarranted development.
Why you should validate your product idea
Testing or validating your ideas is the appropriate step to recognize potential risks early on.
Validation of business ideas is done because of two main reasons.
- Market validation:
Your idea could be the business success of the decade. But without investing in a market need, the idea is completely worthless.
- Risk mitigation:
Testing your startup idea will help handle the risks involved in the project. This is a reasonable and convincing way to prove to some early investors that they will be willing to spend money on your product.
Let’s take a look at the qualities you can use for idea validation:
- Is it practical?
Can your projects be built easily? This question will help you to discover all you’ll need to develop the product, such as skills, technology, and financing.
- Is it Viable?
Will the possibility of gaining from it work out? Is it scalable, and will it last long in the market? Will it withstand or exceed the competition in market capacity and profitability?
- Is it Desirable?
Is it going to be useful and valuable? How often will people want to use it?
- Is it Credible?
What impact will your project have on your consumers, corporations, and the environment? Will it bring happiness or sadness to others?
All these qualities are important. After you’ve determined these questions, the next step is to answer them as considerably and cost-effectively as possible. And make sure to consider each one’s applicable to the success of your product idea.
A brief rundown of these Frameworks that Enable Idea Validation
Knowing that it’s reasonable for products to have imperfections. However, validating an idea is a popular commonsense method. Many frameworks and procedures involve this concept and allow entrepreneurs to validate ideas.
- Lean Startup
This idea validation framework promotes learning and specifying your priorities early on. It helps you focus and identify the right thing to build.
However, this method allows startups to develop a scalable business plan. This framework helps you to learn, not just focusing on performance; the aim is to learn. You don’t need to wait months for a product beta launch to change the company’s direction.
- Customer Development
This is to help you gather evidence to test hypotheses. Validation also creates a link between the product and feasible possibilities, opening the door for developing meaningful products that consumers demand and need and verifying the solutions you come up with.
- Design Thinking
This is called the test idea validation stage, which uses a variety of methodologies. Many of these methods have their origins in the software and system development industries. They mostly use methods in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and User-Centered Design (UCD) studies. The five steps of Design Thinking are: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test.
- Prototyping is usually done early in the project, before ideation, so that you learn more about the consumers.
- Tests must be conducted at any point across Design Thinking or throughout project development.
- Google Design Sprints
Google Design Sprint is a Design Thinking method containing a time-constrained, five-day process for replying to critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. This framework helps you by giving your committee a shortcut to learning without the stress of building or launching a Minimum Viable Product.
Conclusion
Having heard of the reasons why you need an idea validation. It is essential to remember that idea validation doesn’t remove all the problems. Nevertheless, it helps you be more ready to deal with them as they arise.
It is a beneficial way to minimize risks and MVP development costs. Assess all the steps to validate your idea to see if your projects have a potential market, or can become the next big thing the world needs.
