1️⃣ Leave your company with more than just a bullet on your resume.
↪ Watch for customers with underserved needs the company has ignored. You will leave with precious information - audience and market size, need, willingness to pay, competition.
▶ Example: Eric S. Yuan, before founding Zoom, identified user dissatisfaction with existing video conferencing while working at Cisco's WebEx. Users were unhappy due to video quality and reliability. Eric first offered the idea to Cisco but was rejected (surprise..), he left and built Zoom.
2️⃣ Sell before building.
↪ The next best thing is to ask customers to validate the solution before you build it by paying for it.
▶Example: Dave Gandy and Travis Chase used Kickstarter to raise $1M for a not-yet-existing Pro version of Fort Awesome, an open-source icon set and toolkit. Now it is used by 7% of the world's websites.
3️⃣ Create a proof of concept
↪ Create a landing page or video explaining the product and drive traffic.
▶ Example: Foti Panagiotakopoulos, the founder of GrowthMentor, did this before it was a thing. He used a pre-launch landing page and a budget of $500 in Google Ads to validate the idea for his startup. The platform now has 2M users.
4️⃣ Research
↪ Your target audience and their pain with interviews and surveys.
▶Example: Dinnr, a startup providing an online platform for recipe selection and ingredient ordering with cooking guides, gained interest from over 70% of respondents in research studies. However, it shut down after two years due to mistaking general interest for actual market demand.
*This is an effective intermediary step to enable options 2-3 and sometimes 1 but not a way to validate PMF.
#positioning #messaging
↪ Watch for customers with underserved needs the company has ignored. You will leave with precious information - audience and market size, need, willingness to pay, competition.
▶ Example: Eric S. Yuan, before founding Zoom, identified user dissatisfaction with existing video conferencing while working at Cisco's WebEx. Users were unhappy due to video quality and reliability. Eric first offered the idea to Cisco but was rejected (surprise..), he left and built Zoom.
2️⃣ Sell before building.
↪ The next best thing is to ask customers to validate the solution before you build it by paying for it.
▶Example: Dave Gandy and Travis Chase used Kickstarter to raise $1M for a not-yet-existing Pro version of Fort Awesome, an open-source icon set and toolkit. Now it is used by 7% of the world's websites.
3️⃣ Create a proof of concept
↪ Create a landing page or video explaining the product and drive traffic.
▶ Example: Foti Panagiotakopoulos, the founder of GrowthMentor, did this before it was a thing. He used a pre-launch landing page and a budget of $500 in Google Ads to validate the idea for his startup. The platform now has 2M users.
4️⃣ Research
↪ Your target audience and their pain with interviews and surveys.
▶Example: Dinnr, a startup providing an online platform for recipe selection and ingredient ordering with cooking guides, gained interest from over 70% of respondents in research studies. However, it shut down after two years due to mistaking general interest for actual market demand.
*This is an effective intermediary step to enable options 2-3 and sometimes 1 but not a way to validate PMF.
#positioning #messaging
