Goal : Find out whether your solution (concept or real version) can solve people’s problem and whether people would use pay to use it.
There are always many solutions to solve the same problem.
Here you need to find out whether your concept of the best solution actually agree by people facing the same problem. Sometimes doing solution validation actually helps you discover a better solution by getting other people’s opinion and improve or change the concept that you originally set out for.
Doing solution validation helps you gauge and find out answer to questions as follows :
- Does this product really solve the problem, in the market we have identified?
- Illustrate your solution and observe their first reaction when they first know about your solution
- Is your solution something intuitive to use or people would not bother to use
- Is your solution solving the problem partially or totally
- Observe user interaction with your product, look for common symptoms, problems and patterns
- If your product doesn’t seems to solve the problem, is there a better way to do it
- Make your users interact with your competitors’ products, to uncover holes in their products that you will smartly fill
- What part of your product is the most appealing to your target audience
- What part of your product is the hardest to use
- How big is the interest in your product / solution
- What is the price point that people will be paying to use your product
- What are the features that you should or should not have in the product
- What are the ranking of importance of the list of features existing in your product
Select what are the questions that you want to find out about and craft your hypothesis around those questions. Again don't forget to forecast an outcome that you expect prior to collect any data. Here are some questions for your reference :
- What do you think could be done to help you with the problem?
- What would your ideal solution to this problem look like?
- If you could wave a magic wand and instantly have any imaginable solution to this problem, what would it look like?
- What do you think of this product?
- Would this product solve your problem?
- How likely are you/would you be to tell your friends about this product?
- Would you ever use this product?
- Would you be willing to start using this right away?
- What might prevent you from using this product? – Potential hurdles might be budget, time, perception’s of the product’s value, a competing product, etc.
- Will you pay $x for this product?
- What could be done to improve this product?
- What would make you want to tell your friends about this product?
- What’s most appealing to you about this product?
- What might improve your experience using the product?
- What motivates you to continue using this product?
- What’s the hardest part about using this product?
What features do you wish the product had?
Product / solution validation is definitely not a one-off process, in fact, most of the successful companies have validation as one of their core processes in building and improving their product. The difference is that the validation methods that you used before you launch the product versus after launching the product.
Takeaway
The takeaway that we should be getting after doing product / solution validation is that
- The product does solve the problem
- People are willing to pay for the product to solve the problem
- People want to use the product
- You have a big picture of how the product should look like after getting opinions from the right target audience who face the problem
- You have an understanding of the ranking of importance of different features you have in mind, so you know what feature matters the most and should earn your focus
