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You have a killer idea for an app or website. You’re excited, naturally. You can’t wait to build it!
But will other people be as excited as you are?
You could build it and risk finding out the expensive way that other people aren’t as excited about your product idea as you are. Or, you could do it the cheaper, quicker way by doing some user research before you commit.
Download our template: Five steps to assess market viability through user research to identify what you know about your market already, and what you need to find out through user research.
When we work with clients, we want them to avoid making expensive mistakes. The biggest mistake is building a product that no-one uses because it doesn’t have value to them. The most efficient way to address that risk upfront is exploratory research to understand the target audience and the context in which they may, or may not, choose to use a product.
Building a mobile app can cost anywhere from many tens of thousands to over a million dollars, depending on how complex it is. User research can cost just a few thousand dollars and can make the difference between a product or service that people use, and one where people think ‘nice idea, but I wouldn’t use it.’ Investing in quality user research is the fastest way to understand whether people genuinely want your idea.
User research can help with the first three of the four big risks any product or service has to address if it is to be a success (Marty Cagan talks about this in his book Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love):
In our experience failing to gather any evidence about these questions before you start to build will almost always be an expensive mistake. If your idea isn’t going to work for people you want to know that before you’ve spent money building it.
At PaperKite, we have a process for doing user research to assess market desirability and viability reasonably quickly, treating each question like a stage gate. If the customer research shows the idea passes one stage gate, we know it’s worth moving on to the evidence for the next. While the stage gates are a helpful way of identifying what needs to be true before it’s worth moving on, in practice we can usually gather evidence for all the stage gates in just one or two rounds of customer research.
We recommend testing any idea for a new digital product or service against each of these five areas before committing to development. Research with your target market – but definitely not your friends and family! – is the recommended way to get answers to each of the viability questions.
Do enough people have the problem your product or service solves? Is your potential market large enough? Just because you and a few people you know have a problem doesn’t mean there are enough people with the same problem to make it worthwhile solving. And if enough people do have the problem you also need to understand if they already have a solution to it and, if so, how well that solution is working for them.
Do people know they have the problem and care enough about it to want it solved? If they don’t, you’ll have to work a lot harder because you’ll need to sell the problem as well as your solution to it.
Will people pay enough for your product to make a viable business? How much would they be willing to pay? And how easily can they carry that cost? When push comes to shove, how would they prioritise paying for your product compared to something else they value – like their Netflix subscription.
Are people willing and able to buy from you? And do you have the credibility to win customers over from incumbents? Your target customers may be locked into using an existing product for a variety of reasons, from annual subscription periods to all the time and data they’ve invested in it.
It’s much cheaper to retain a customer than get a new one. Is there an enduring need for your product, or is it a point-in-time problem where you’ll constantly need to acquire new customers?
If the answer is ‘yes’ to these key questions, you can be much more confident your product or service will pass the desirability and viability tests. It’s still no guarantee of success, but it will give you much more solid foundations for investing in design and development.
Thanks to Jason Cohen for his brilliantly named article Excuse me, is there a problem? for informing our thinking.
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