Pre Product Market Fit
You may think this is an easy question to answer. I’m met with a variety of different answers — and it’s likely many are made up on the spot. Responses range from coherent to incomprehensible. Every now and then, there’s even awkward, prolonged silence XD.
Use this article as a way to understand the tools and tactics at your disposal to design a product-market fit with the idea.
Here there is some simple best practice, commonly used to bootstrap an idea and avoid waste of time, cost expenses and help you prove there is a market for your idea before create/develop a beta:
Analyze the Buzz
- Quora ads on discussions about the pain point and use a call to action, in the title, similar to: “What if there was a solution to _____?” Then describe your product in the description. If the CTR it’s closer to 5% it’s a good starting point. Test out a few different value propositions below the headline.
- Use specific workspace on Quora aligned with your idea and ask people feedbacks to understand something you haven’t well understood about the pains for your potential audience. Try to catch how much is the magnitude and the frequency for them.
- Humans of Reddit (Editor) Website
- Hacker News Website open a thread here to catch interesting feedbacks and ideas to evolve your basic idea
Market Analysis
- Statista Inc. Website — it’s an interesting source of aggregated data, but not always you find all the market segment you’re looking for.
- Google Trends Website
- CB Insights Website
- Trend Hunter Website
- PwC_Luxembourg Website
Analyze Competitors
- Explode through an excel where the features offered from different competitors, write each customer segment on the horizontal column and match them out with all the competitors’ features and yours
- Try to understand how they are communicating with their customers and analyze all the keywords used in visual communication
“Smoke” landing pages
- Create Ad-Words Campaign intercept the right intent keywords, in the “Consideration” phase, in order to drive the traffic to your landing page worth audience just focussed to solve their problem.
- Create a landing page with a simple value proposition to be included in the beta when you’ll launch it. Be really clear with your potential audience and explain the product by video, images and some other stuff.
Embed a form with name, email address and one question like “How much time or money will this product save you?”. This can be interesting because it explains the real interest of the users.
Request feedback
- Send Email. Don’t try to sell them. Make the email request just in person, solely about appreciating their feedback with another question :). You are not welcome in their inbox, so if your product does not ‘wow’ them, they will not answer, but if it does make them happy, they’ll give you some interesting feedbacks in charge.