We touched a little bit about this in the other post and you might be asking yourself - “I’ve heard this word thrown around before, but ‘what the heck is it?’”

Market Validation is the process you go through to see if your target market really needs your product. Essentially, it helps you to reasonably predict whether your business will be profitable or if you’re wasting your time (and hard earned dollars).

According to Harvard Business School, there are 5 steps to determine market validation. We will go through them with our hypothetical example of a habit tracker.

Write down goals, assumptions, and hypothesis.

Assess Market size and value

Dear reader, this part made me want to bang my head against the wall. You have to do research and try to understand numbers. It’s DRY and mind numbing. But, I persevered and will attempt to make this palatable for you

Research Search Volume of Related Terms

There are a lot of resources that help you see how often people look for certain terms. I used google trends. I altered my filters so that it looks at the past 12 months.

Based on this data, people are keen to create new habits at the beginning of the year which is not surprising. I was curious to see how this compared to other search words

Based on this, it looks like habit education (perhaps an endorsement from James Clear(?)) and heavily promoting our habit app after New years might be the way to go if we want our habit app to be successful

Conduct customer validation interviews

We covered this in our previous article, however let me reiterate how IMPORTANT THIS IS! You are building your app in order to make your customer’s life easier! It’s important to know your customer and ask them what they think of your idea before you build it. Again, it will save you a lot of time and money in the future.

Last but not least, Test your product or service

But wait, how can I test my product if It doesn’t exist yet?

Well dear reader, we are going to be repeating step 5 constantly throughout our journey. For now, chatting with your potential customers and gathering as much insight as you can into what their pain points are is enough.

Coming up next: How to pick a software development team - Onshore vs Offshore

Sources: https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/market-validation

https://learn.marsdd.com/article/how-to-estimate-market-size-business-and-marketing-planning-for-startups/

https://trends.google.com/trends/