Validate your product: 19 market testing and market validation tactics (plus 7 tools for validating)

Original Article: Validate your product: 19 market testing and market validation tactics (plus 7 tools for validating)

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Validating a product properly can be make or break. It's a big topic, so I didn't get into it in my post on generating startup ideas. But people seemed interested in that part of the process, so I did some digging.

Here's a list of validation techniques, starting with the easiest (which also tend to be low-confidence) and moving to the hardest (high-confidence). Hope it helps!

Define validate

Validation is the process of determining whether there is a need for your product in the market, as well as whether people are willing to pay to have that need met.

It requires a deep dive into the problem, the market, and the solution (product). And it's how we founders step outside of our founder blindness and rely on cold, hard data to show us whether or not a product has legs.

In this context, the truest form of validation tends to be the exchange of money.

Ways to validate: Market research

The first step is to do some research. This, in itself, probably won't serve as sufficient validation, but it's your first line of defense against unsustainable ideas.

Start by writing down your goals, assumptions, and hypotheses. What will you be testing? What will you consider as validation? Then get into your research.

• Conduct a competitive analysis: Do you have any competition? If so, that's generally considered a good thing (within reason). Identify your competitors and look into how they're doing. If they're thriving, that could be a measure of validation right there. To really understand your competitors, you can take it a step further with a SWOT analysis.
• Check out marketplaces: In the same vein as competitive analysis, check out marketplaces where products like yours are sold. The number of similar products, as well as their ratings and comments, can give you a new level of insight into the market and what your target customers are looking for.
• Check out review sites: Yet another form of competitive analysis. Look up reviews of your competitors on sites like G2 and Capterra. You can learn a lot about the struggles of your potential customers this way, and you'll learn whether your idea fills a hole that other products aren't filling.
• Discover search interest: Tools like Google Trends, Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, and SEMRush can help you to understand what (and if) people are searching in your niche. More to the point, you can find out whether your solution is being sought out and if it's on the rise, or if a pivot could bring you more in line with the search traffic.
• Online (and offline) communities: @amyhoy calls it a "Sales Safari." Essentially you want to go where your target customers hang out and watch them interact. You'll often hear about pain points, purchasing decisions, and all sorts of things you might otherwise be clueless about.
• Quora: Check out questions people have asked in relation to your...