Product Validation
When building a SaaS it’s always critical to validate the idea before heavily investing in it. Initial validation won’t guarantee success but it increases the odds in two ways:
- Forces you to know who your customer is and how you can connect with them.
- Allows you to more cheaply confirm if your customer wants what you are planning on selling.
Know Your Customer
Knowing who your customers are and how you can communicate with them is critical for your business. If you come up with the perfect solution to an expensive problem, but you are unable to communicate that to your customers, they will be unable to purchase from you! That is why you must know your customers and how to get ahold of them.
Knowing where your customer hangs out will greatly affect how you communicate. There is a huge difference between a customer who is only on TikTok versus one who regularly attends tradeshows.
One of the key outcomes you are looking out for is no results. If you cannot find any way to talk to your customer now, that is a big problem to solve before you invest all your time and money into a product you cannot sell.
Customer Feedback
Once you have found your customer, you want to talk to them about your idea and see if they are interested in it. A verbal confirmation that they find your solution valuable can be a good indicator of interest but nothing beats an email address or credit card.
Some of the options for validating your idea will ask your potential customer to pay in a small way. This often is their email address, which lets you contact them directly, or pre-payment for the product. These give weight to someone’s interest and are much more valuable to you than just a “yes”, read The Mom Test for more on this.
Validating your idea before you start developing it allows you to confirm there is customer demand before spending all the time and money on development. This significantly de-risks the project, allows you to tweak your solution sooner, and ultimately increases the likelihood that your product is successful.