7 questions to answer when validating a product idea

Coming up with ideas is easy — validating them and turning them into viable products is hard. It’s even harder when you have so many stakeholders telling you what you should build and how. So how do you make sure that you’re getting the right information before heavily investing into building a new product?

I usually frame the information I need into questions, so I can understand which piece of information serves what purpose. Here are the 7 questions that I ask to get an understanding of the business viability of an idea:

1. What’s the problem?

It is very important to get the problem right. It’s recommended to start with defining the problem, but let’s face it: most of us start with a solution more often than we would like to. If that resonates with you, you need to take a few steps back. You can use quantitative methods such as sending surveys, or qualitative methods like user research to gain an understanding of the problem space a bit better.

2. What are the existing solutions?

Competitor analysis helps with understanding the landscape and the market you’re planning to launch your product to. If there are no competitors, you might not be looking hard enough (e.g. a potential competitor to a note-taking app is a physical notebook). A competitor analysis can also help you understand whether the problem is worth solving or not. I generally do a very lightweight competitor analysis by taking the top 3 competitors, investigating what solutions they offer and evaluating their value proposition; you can get as many details as you need to.

3. Who are the users you’re targeting?

Market research is the way to go here. You need to get an understanding of who you’re solving the problem for — ideally your market segments contain the following information:
Geographic: country, language…etc.
Demographic: Age, occupation, income…etc.
Psychographic: lifestyle, values, concerns…etc.
Behavioural: benefits sought, purchase…etc.

4. How many users have this problem?

This question is about understanding if your market is big enough to have a long-lasting revenue stream: the bigger the total addressable market (TAM), the better. There are multiple ways to calculate TAM, some are listed here.

5. What’s your solution?

In this step it’s useful to start deep-diving into the solution; make some assumptions on what features are needed in your product to be viable (MVP) and create low fidelity prototypes.

6. Is it the right solution?

It’s important to validate your solution as soon as possible by doing user research and getting feedback on prototypes. You need to test the usability of your solution when the prototypes are at a more advanced stage. This ensures users not only find your product useful but also find the user experience delightful.

7. Will users pay for your solution?

Testing willingness-to-pay (WTP) is very tricky, because you’re basically asking users to predict their future behaviour (which people are usually not very good at). This Coursera video is an excellent resource to understand how to get WTP through surveys.

What are your steps to validate a product idea? Please post them in the comments — I would love to learn more!