The Importance of Building a Startup Idea Validation Framework

Validating a startup idea is more important for a founder and his team to do than anything else. Without it, people will not want to buy the product. The results of your hard work with the team will be wasted if that happens.

In his writing on the page Medium, Michell Harper shares tips on what steps to take when building a framework for validating market ideas before disbursing funds. According to him, these tips are exactly the same as what he and his team did when they first built Bigcommerce in 2009.

1. Write down the problem, not the specific solution

You want to clearly state what problems each person experiences on a daily basis. For that, focus on the problem, not the solution. You can write down the problem in a simple statement.

Example: It is impossible to do follow up towards customers who have left the restaurant or are too difficult to design professional-quality graphics on social media.

In essence, you get the idea, but it has to be a very basic problem, so you need to keep working on it until a complete problem sentence is formed.

2. Determine whether it is a tier 1 problem or not

Finding a problem is easy work, but determining whether it is a tier 1 (major) problem or not is not an easy task because it means that you are trying to solve one of the three levels of problems facing your potential customers.

If you don't provide a solution to their tier 1 problem, it means that whatever product you offer will be useless. To know how to validate your problem is a tier 1 problem or not, you first need to map the consumer type. You do this by creating a basic profile.

Start by making the scale of the company, the intended position, the type of industry, and its location. This can be searched via LinkedIn. Next, make a phone appointment via email. The form must be to the point, lest the time of potential customers is wasted. You can immediately write down the purpose of contacting them as initial research, specifying in detail when, and the duration.

In this process, the law of probability applies. This means that of the many people you contact, only a few percent will reply to messages. So, if you want to get 20 respondents at least you need to contact about 60 people.

3. Determine existing solutions

Once you get the correspondence, you'll get a new idea of ​​how their strategy is to solve a tier 1 problem. It's a good idea, Harper says, not to ask what product helped them solve the problem, because they certainly won't tell you. Instead you ask how.

Often, when you want to solve a problem, there are other companies doing the same thing. However, this can also backfire. If no company is trying to solve the problem you are also solving it could be because there is no market or your problem is too specific for a few people.

Therefore, you need to balance between specific problems and market conditions.

4. Look for the weaknesses of existing solutions

Whether the correspondent uses a product on the market or not. You need to identify whether there are weaknesses in the product. Ask them if they like the current product, if not what they want.

This is useful so that the product you are launching does not have a solution with identical similarities to competitors. Approximately with a percentage difference of at least 20% is the best threshold for your product to be chosen by potential customers compared to other products.

5. Check the budget again

If you have competitors with the goal of solving the same problem, pay attention to their traction. Is it growing fast? How's the volume? Have they made a profit? Try to find clues from all the questions.

Mostly, if competitors don't have good products but have profits and there are buyers, this indicates that there are people who have budget allocations to spend on the same products as you.

From the respondents you contact, ask them if there is a product that is better than the existing one launched to the market at what price they are willing to pay. If the response is not to buy, you need to dig deeper into the reason.

6. Use respondents to define your roadmap

Assuming you've solved a tier 1 problem in the product you're creating, it means that someone will buy your product. Once you've completed these six steps, you literally haven't spent a penny.