If you ever launched your digital product you know that a validation of your product can be crucial to make things work out in the end and eventually reach success.

So did I. And I learned so many things on the way through all those mistakes. There are so many consequences of skipping a validation process. You might end up with wasted resources (your valuable time), damage your (personal) brand, and eventually, even miss market opportunities because you did not have an eye on the market.

The goal of today’s issue is, that you get confidence and validation for your idea so you are ready for a successful product launch. Let’s dive straight in!

Market Insights

Product validation is all about empathy for the people who will buy your product. You need to understand them. First, identify your target audience, aka your potential customers. Research what your potential customers need, what trends they are following, and what you’ve got for competition out there.

Secret Hack: Ask ChatGPT. Give it enough context and the role as your customer and it can give you all the insights and issues you are looking for.

Once you have enough insight into your target audience, it's time to develop a few actionable instances that will give you the validation data you need.

Validation Instances

Everything you did until now, is purely guessed. You don’t know if it’s true or false. It’s now time to get some data to underline your assumptions and validate if they are correct. In my journey as a solopreneur and designer who launches my ideas, I’ve used two main methods to validate my products with real customers:

Concept Testing

Create a minimal viable product (MVP) of your product and show it to certain people in your target audience. You can see this as some sort of user testing. But you don’t test the UX, but the idea itself. I’ve done this a few times before I built Dashfolio+ (the pro version of Dashfolio).

Social Validation

If you are building your products in public, which I highly recommend, you should already have a few hundred if not thousands of followers. If so, this is amazing, and you should use this power for validation. Post sneak peeks of your product and ask if they would use it. (Don’t ask for feedback, we just want to know if it’s something they would like to use for themselves).

If you don’t want to directly ask, you can also rely on post analytics. How did the sneak peek post perform? How many likes, reposts, and comments did it get? If it’s very high, the product has higher interest, which is exactly what we want. Check these numbers regularly on all your pre-launch posts.

Coming Soon Sites

In addition to qualitative research and social analytics, you should also set up a "Coming Soon" landing page that collects email addresses for you. (Emails are the most valuable data sets in marketing, don’t sleep on it). If you are looking for a tool to build your website on, I highly recommend using Framer. They even have a massive amount of templates you can use as a base. So your site is online in literally hours, and not days or months! Also, make sure to enable analytics to track visitor behavior and interest levels.

Wrap up

As you can see, there are simple steps to validate your idea before you launch with high risk. Launch by reducing your risk of failing and brand damage beforehand. Test your concept, track social analytics of your sneak peeks, and put up a coming soon website that collects emails from potential customers.

I hope this article helps you to launch your ideas with confidence!