How to do Business Idea Validation with the Right Tools?

You've developed a unique business idea with secured initial funding. So next, it's time to validate your product idea with affordable and proper tools. 

If you don't invest some time in the correct idea generation and validation tools, you will somewhere lack in making your business profitable.

Business idea validation can help you easily predict whether people will buy your product or not? And whether your business earns growth?

In this article, we will look at what idea validation is?  How does it play an essential role in approving a new product? And what are the various validation tools and more?

What is Business Idea Validation?

Idea validation collects proof about ideas via experimentation to make speedy, informed, and less risky decisions. This process starts with an idea and typically ends with a paying customer.

Idea validation aims to reveal the concept to the practicality of the natural world before you and produce and release the final product or offer in the market.

It’s necessary to validate your idea earlier in the entrepreneurial approach to confirm you are not wasting time and resources developing a product that isn’t a good fit. 

Reserving market validation can also help you gain confidence among investors, crowd funders, and banks believing in funding your business.

Why Should Business Ideas be Validated?

New ideas have unexpected features, and if some of them go wrong, they can ruin your plans at once. Validation can assist you in declining the risk, accelerating the market release of a value-creating service, and diminishing the expenses.

The most intelligent approach is to verify the problems first in your product and check if your solution can fix them. Your product concept must possess features like solving a real problem, achieving its goal, or appealing to other incentives.

What are the Steps Involved in Validating an Idea?

Validation is eventually about experimenting with assumptions. It’s crucial to test the most challenging hypothesis first and not waste your time on something that doesn’t have the potential to grow. 

The Play-to-Win strategy structure might be helpful for you when performing testing and making decisions. Although there are numerous ways to validate an idea, the overall validation procedure is straightforward.

However, if your presumptions about your product are valid, you can begin checking them to learn how all of the features will work in reality. Further, have a look at the steps involved in the idea validation process - 

1. Set your Goal - 

Validation begins with setting your goals. In this stage, you will determine what you want to study and what characteristics to validate in your product.

Your goal can depend on one of the following factors, for example:

• Issue– Is your problem real and worth solving?
• Answer– Is your product/service going to be able to fix the issue?
• Attributes– How do your product's primary features work?
• Business Plan – Is your business plan adaptable and workable?
• Cost– Is there sufficient demand to support your company model at your set pricing? How does your pricing approach work in reality?

Your goal is to find the most crucial assumption associated with your unique idea. Therefore make sure you start with the essential one and make your product the most satisfactory.

2. Construct a Hypothesis - 

After you have portrayed your goal for idea validation, it’s time to generate a hypothesis depending on that goal. A valid inference is a testable assertion, which usually comprises a prediction.

The idea is, to begin with, the most critical assumption, which is the one that's the most possible to fail, and would also have the worst results. So you need to find out what would have to be correct for the idea to be achievable?

3. Experiment and Make Changes - 

Once you've formed a hypothesis, you can take insights using experiments. The purpose of experimentation is to discover the quickest and most affordable path to test your assumption in practice. 

You can perform a set of tests that measure the effects of your idea and tell whether or not you should proceed with it. In simple words, an experiment runs to know if your assumption is accurate or not. 

There are a lot of distinct ways to execute an experiment, some of which we are explaining here:

1. Create an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) - Idea validation comes before initial funding, MVP, etc.

The whole concept is not to waste money by building MVP directly. You can validate your idea first, then make a move. People do not commit to spending money until they see their ideas are validated correctly. 

2. Fake It until you made it/ Wizard of Oz

3. Interview or survey

4. Crowdfunding platform 

5. A/B test to make additional versions of your advertising campaigns to notice which one performs more suitable

You might like to use Wizard of Oz prototyping or alike when looking to validate a product. Further, you may create a landing page and conduct A/B tests when validating a price. 

4. Validate and Produce- 

You should ensure your assumption is either valid or invalid at this stage. If your product idea is potential and the most strong belief, you can initiate refining your concept. However, validation may not always imply success until it has fulfilled the most critical assumptions made by you earlier. 

Employing the data you have collected in the validation process will surely help when you start producing and executing your idea.

Which are the Tools we can Use for Idea Validation?

Now that you have understood the complete process of validating a product idea. Now let's have a look at some of the best validation tools that you can use while implementing the concept validating process - 

1. PickFu - 

PickFu is a testing tool that assembles data and feedback almost immediately via survey or poll. Though it is a marketing tool, it will be handy for entrepreneurs. Anyone can utilize it and see value in it. 

PickFu will prove a helpful tool for those who have assertions or decisions to create and those who want to gain feedback from essential respondents.

Let us now understand who would be the typical users of the PickFu tool - 

- Authors: Who need feedback on their book design, book title, or which book among the other choices would be the best read. 

- App developers: When they want opinions or comments on their app icon design, the type of app preferred by people, etc. 

- Entrepreneurs: To know people’s thoughts on their logo design, business name, favored product, etc.

So we can say that PickFu will be very beneficial to people who want to experiment with their ideas and collect opinions from many users. 

2. SurveyMonkey - 

SurveyMonkey is a powerful online survey platform. It permits users to quickly build and send surveys, gather and store data, and generate reports. 

Surveys are essential to collect feedback, criticism, and suggestions from the audience and customers. So with this, you can run professional surveys over the internet. 

SurveyMonkey also gives a link to the survey, which you can then post on your website or add in an e-mail to send to participants. SurveyMonkey includes multiple features like design options, collection, analysis, etc.

3. Qualtrics CoreXM - 

Qualtrics CoreXM is a cloud-based application that helps businesses to produce sales wisdom and optimize product costs via analysis of consumer experiences in real-time. 

Its primary features are collecting feedback, idea testing, product prioritization, opportunity examination, and reporting.

With this software, companies can gather feedback from pre-configured surveys, study open text responses using Text iQ, and calculate customer sentiments via scoring. 

Additionally, workers can use Qualtrics CoreXM to watch surveys and obtain advice about broken question logic, mobile incompatibility, or adherence issues.

4. QuestionPro - 

QuestionPro is a SaaS survey platform that provides applications to calculate and operate customer experience, employee engagement, and a knowing audience. 

You can use QuestionPro software to take advantage of a wide range of point-and-click online survey reasons without spending hours. 

Hence, you can easily construct online surveys and polls and convey them to target audiences with this tool. With received insights, you can easily make decisions for your business. 

5. DirectPoll - 

DirectPoll assists you in conducting and creating polls in seconds. You can use this software for a lecture, converted classroom, or amaze your audience.

If you wish to interact with your customers while performing a presentation, it’s potential with the DirectPoll application. 

This polling tool provides a real-time, responsive feature for your audience. Therefore, you can sense your audience’s feelings, ask short questions, and witness the answers as they come in real-time.

You can even prepare your poll in advance if you have less time on your side. In addition, you can merge multiple and single questions if you like.

6. Acquainted - 

We can consider Acquainted a survey widget that helps construct chatbot polls quickly and easily. 

With Acquainted, you can entertain your audience via mobile devices with a convenient chat interface that makes the survey complete a cakewalk. Also, you can explore the results of surveys instantly on your admin dashboard.

Further, you don’t need to be a tech expert to understand the setup of this tool since it does not have complex survey creators. 

7. Google Surveys - 

Google Surveys is a business software that enables customized market research. Google Surveys delivers a web interface to design to create online forms and surveys with numerous question types. 

The survey questions are related to some conditions in length and content. With Surveys, businesses want to forecast their customer behavior and needs and estimate market trends. It is an easy, affordable tool to get the answers and feedback people need in just a day or two. 

8. Jotform - 

Jotform is a form builder platform that helps you build forms, surveys, order forms, etc., on the internet. It comes with an easy and intuitive drag and drops method and doesn’t demand you to write a single line of code.

With Jotform, you can construct and publish forms, incorporate them into your website, and receive responses via emails.

9. SurveySparrow - 

SurveySparrow is online survey software that allows you to turn surveys into conversations. It has an extended range of query types and elements to build engaging and conversational surveys. Also, you can share a cheerful personal study with your respondents.

Using SurveySparrow, you can gather opinions via a chat-like experience, acquire insights and thus make more profitable decisions. SurveySparrow drives usage of a conversational interface to result in up to 40% higher fulfillment rates and better results.

SurveySparrow helps you build multiple kinds of surveys like customer satisfaction surveys, workers pulse surveys, market research, or even receiving product feedback.  

10. Pinpoll - 

Pinpoll is another excellent survey software that assists you in engaging with your audience seamlessly. You can build online quizzes and voting polls for your customers in minutes.

Additionally, Pinpoll helps you in marketing. So you can boost your ad acquisition revenue with its “ads in polls” distinctive feature.

This tool will be a superb choice if you operate a large company with multiple departments and roles. It lets you combine surveys or polls for your employees to get their opinions and know the reviews of your workforce.

Conclusion -

Whether you're a first-time entrepreneur or have had dozens of business ideas, idea validation is always essential for you. 

It is a perfect way for those in the initial phase to confirm that their first investments have a solid foundation. 

In addition, for those who already have experience, idea validation is a fantastic way to get out of their head and extend their opinion on the customer’s problems.

If you are also thinking about making your business successful, you must go for the idea validation procedure and utilize uncomplicated tools.

We hope the information we have shared in this post about idea validation and tools will help you in your business. In case of any more questions, you can comment to us we will help you with your queries.