If You Build It - Will They Come?
- Daniel Gonzalez
- Feb 7, 2024
- 7 min read
Updated: Jun 21, 2024
Reduce risk in your product development and save time and money by validating your product’s purpose.
This article is the third in a series of articles for EdTech entrepreneurs with too much on their "to-build" list (commonly referred to as a backlog). The second article is here. |
Product development is risky. The failure rate of new products is high – 95% by some estimates. As an entrepreneur, you have a lot of time, energy, and resources invested in your company. It is your baby. You dream about your product being one of those that succeeds.
But what can you do to reduce the risk of failure? Validate your product's purpose.
In this article, we’ll talk about validating your product’s purpose as a method of reducing risk. If you have read each article of the series, at this point you have determined that you need to reduce your scope and you have defined your product’s purpose.
Do the people you serve want what you’re building?
One of the many methods of reducing risk that is particularly important is to validate that people will want what you are building. After all, if no one wants what you’re building, nothing else matters.
If no one wants what you’re building, nothing else matters.
How much validation do I need?
How much validation you need will vary depending on how closely you match the people you serve, how much validation has previously been done, and how high the stakes are for you.
How Closely You Match the People You Serve
If your team has a lot of first-hand experience in the same roles as the people you serve, you may feel more comfortable moving quickly through this step. For example, if you have seen the problem first-hand as classroom teachers and you have friends and colleagues who agree (both inside and outside of your own building or district) you may not need to spend as much time doing validation. However, remember that EdTech often has multiple groups of people served, and getting other groups’ perspectives is important (as explained in the previous article).
On the other hand, if your team has little or no first-hand experience in one or more of these roles, I strongly encourage you to speak to people who do. If you’re in a rush, you can tap in quickly to customers who have been engaging with you already and are making suggestions for improvements. They will be the most likely to respond quickly – just make sure you’re not listening to a few loud outliers.
How Much Validation You Have Previously Done
If you have done little or no validation before, spending the time up front is well worth the effort, especially now that you have a clear product purpose.
However, if you have done validation before and your product’s purpose hasn’t changed significantly, you may not need to do much again. This includes not just formal validation, but also the informal validation that comes from having a product in the market. If you are getting a high level of engagement and satisfaction with your customers already, you may already have most of the validation you need. It’s still worth reaching out to some of your customers to see if your articulated purpose resonates with them.
How High the Stakes Are
How much validation you need also depends on how high the stakes are. If you are about to spend your life’s savings funding your business, you’re going to want to collect a lot of evidence that your money is being well spent, and that you are solving a real problem that customers care about. If the cost of failure is relatively low (say, you’re developing an inexpensive prototype for some friends) you can afford to do less validation.
What Kinds of Options Does Validation Typically Involve?
There are many options for the types of validation you can do. Some options provide quantitative data and others provide qualitative data. The best validations usually come from a mix of both qualitative and quantitative data. Below are some of the most popular and effective validation options.
Surveys
Surveys are a great way to get feedback from many people. They are typically inexpensive, can be created and delivered quickly, and the data can be easily analyzed. Surveys allow you to collect both quantitative and qualitative data. Be sure to design your surveys carefully. Keeping surveys short, not asking for identifying information up front, and saving open-ended questions for the end are some of the many best practices you will want to follow.
Also, be sure not to “lead the witness” in your questions. Focus on the elements of your purpose as much as possible to validate that they resonate with the people you serve. If your respondents are familiar with your product, you can and should ask questions that get at how well your product is meeting its purpose.
1:1 Interviews
Nothing beats 1:1 interviews for collecting qualitative data. You can dig very deep into your target customers’ wants, needs, and problems they are facing. The downside with 1:1 interviews is that they can be very time consuming to execute for a relatively small number of interviews. You may also need to pay users for their time and work around their schedule (for example, teachers have very little flexibility around when they can be available during standard work hours).
Be sure you are prepared with a well-structured interview script, respectful of your users’ time, and try to observe the user in the environment in which they will use your product whenever possible. There is an art and science to properly interviewing customers. If you are new to it, I suggest picking up a copy of Interviewing Users, by Steve Portigal.
If you have a prototype or actual product, you can ask questions about it, but validate your purpose first, and be careful not to have interviews run too long.
Group Interviews
Group interviews have the advantage of getting more user feedback at a time than 1:1 interviews. They are highly qualitative in nature. They are more challenging to facilitate, however, as the facilitator must be able to solicit feedback from everyone in the interview, not just those who talk the most. Group interviews tend to be better in scenarios where customers build on each other’s ideas, for example, brainstorming.
Usage Data
If you have a live product, you may have actual usage data you can tap into. Depending on the quality and quantity of your data, you may be able to examine it to better understand usage patterns like what features are most (and least) used in your product, how long users interact with those features, and whether they are having the desired outcomes.
If you have enough data, you can do all of this without reaching out directly to users. Sometimes your usage data is better than users’ memories. However, usage data can tell you what is happening, but not usually why it is happening. Use the insights gained from data analysis to shape your 1:1 interview script to get at the “what” and the “why.”
Validate as Much as Your Situation Requires
You know your situation best and your tolerance for risk. If you’re taking a lot of risk and your tolerance for risk is low, you will want to perform a lot of validation. If you are taking on fairly low risk, and your tolerance for risk is high, you may choose not to do very much validation. Gather all the validation that is appropriate. Do not, however, skip this step because you are in a rush. Action-oriented entrepreneurs may feel pressure to move quickly.
However, skipping this step can lead to dire consequences down the road. The cheapest and easiest time to pivot and make changes in product development is before you build. Also, investors and anyone you are looking to recruit will respond well to evidence you have that your product will succeed in the marketplace.
investors and those you are looking to recruit will respond well to evidence you have that your product will succeed in the marketplace.
What if your purpose is invalidated?
What do you do if you execute the validation options above and your purpose does not resonate with the people you serve? In that case, take a deep breath, and remember that the purpose of validating is to identify problems early, before you have spent a lot of time, resources, and energy. Be thankful you identified the lack of resonance early, and do the following:
Ensure you properly executed the validation: review the steps you took in your validation to be sure mistakes weren’t made along the way. Make sure you spoke to enough people, too.
If the validation is correct, then embrace the entrepreneur’s best friend – pivoting! Ask yourself the following questions:
Are you serving the right people? Perhaps the product you are envisioning is better suited for a different target audience. Speak with customers or interview participants and ask them if they know of people with whom your ideas will resonate.
Are they feeling the pain of the problem? If the problem that you are attempting to solve isn’t felt by the people you serve, they won’t pay money to solve it. Iterate on the problem. Have more conversations with the people you serve. Is there a way to rephrase problem so that it does resonate? Is there are related problem they are feeling? Don’t force it. If the people you serve truly do not feel the pain of the problem you are looking to solve, either find a new problem to solve or serve different people.
Are they unconvinced of the solution? If the people you serve are feeling the pain of the problem you are looking to solve, they may simply not be convinced that your proposed product will solve the problem. In this case, spend more time with them. Ask probing questions as to why they feel this way. Unless they feel the problem is better solved by a beloved competitor, this is a good place to be in, as you can spend time iterating with them to make your product better.
Pivot accordingly with the new information you have. If you are able to achieve the desired validation with a small pivot, that is preferable to a large pivot, as it takes time and energy from you and your entire team to change directions. However, pivot as much as is needed to achieve the desired validation.
An entrepreneur's best friend is pivoting. If your purpose is invalidated - pivot until you find a purpose that resonates.
Conclusion and Next Steps
Spending time up front validating your product’s purpose is time well-spent. Resist the entrepreneur’s urge to just start building, as validating your product’s purpose will save time, money, and energy, and increase your chances of success. It has an additional bonus of collecting evidence your product will succeed, which can be shared with investors and others you are looking to recruit to your cause.
You have a variety of options for validating, including 1:1 interviews, analyzing usage data, distributing surveys, and group interviews. How much validation you need to do depends on your tolerance for risk and the amount of risk you are taking.
If you do the validation and your product’s purpose doesn’t resonate with the people you serve, pivot accordingly. Experimentation and pivoting are much more likely to lead to success than blind faith that your product’s purpose will resonate with the market.
Now that you’ve got a validated product purpose, you’ve laid the foundation for managing your scope by prioritizing. We’ll talk about that in our next article.
