Customer Development: What is the best way to validate the market/usefulness of a mobile app idea (concept)?

Another thing you can do to validate ideas in an early stage is to GOOGLE THEM! Yep, just search the app idea on google and you will get lots of information like whether:  - The app already exists or not.  - The apps that currently do what you thought lack some features.  - People are really interested in such idea and are willing to pay for it.  - And more. Here's a detailed article I recently wrote on this subject. http://thestartuprecipe.com/2013/01/14/is-your-app-idea-good-enough/ Good luck! Pablo

From what I have learned at the d-school at Stanford and as an entrepreneur. I would say there are two key aspects : First you need to go on the field with a quick prototype of your app. You don't even need a smartphone, your prototype can be a notebook with mockups of your app. Put it in the hands of your target users and listen. Don't explain your idea, it's when your target user has your prototype in his hand but no influenced by your ideas that it's the most interesting You can also get more quantitative data about the market by doing market research. For instance, on HeyCrowd (I am the co-founder) you can ask simple single-question poll for free to a mobiel community. You can ask more complicated surveys to our mobile panel at http://heycrowd.com/surveys/creation

First, question yourself. Look at your idea as a tree, and you are a lumberjack. Take an axe to it, and try and knock it down. If it's a great idea, then it will easily withstand the cutting blade. If not, it will fall and you have no need to invest in the idea any further. If the idea is still "standing," then clearly define who will use the idea and how they will use it. Understand how it will be used by the target audience and how they will use it OVER TIME. If you create a mobile app that is only used "once or twice" then it's an offering that will not be integrated and integral to users lifestyles. You may be happy with casual usage, so this may be enough. I wouldn't be. I'd aim for a mobile app that becomes a "lifestyle" app, one that people use all the time. If you don't have that, consider going back step number one, above. Once you have confidence in the idea and that it will be one that will be an integral part of people's lives, mock it up. Make a functional prototype, and then test it. Accept that the first version won't be right! Take the feedback to heart: revise, polish, improve. Make it better. Iterate, refine, and focus on making it work for the intended market and users.

Market research. You can do it qualitatively or quantitatively, but you need to get a feel for if people are actually willing to pay for/use your app. Qualitatively-- listen to what people are saying on Facebook, Twitter, Quora, etc. Are they complaining about a void that your app fills? Quantitatively-- create a survey using Survey Monkey and distribute it to your friends, or pay for a market research firm to distribute it to strangers (less of a bias). Good luck!

Whatever you do, don't dive right into coding. Before you have a lot of customer feedback, working on a brand new app idea is quite probably a financial suicide. However, you still need to explain your idea to people if you are to get their feedback - so I suggest the following validation workflow: Try to explain your idea in a digestible, easy-to-understand format. Draw sketches, write a 2-sentence elevator pitch. Transform your idea from abstract concepts into ‘tangible’ images. After getting some feedback from people (make sure that they are in your target audience), design the interface. You don’t need a pro designer for this – dedicate an afternoon to learning basics of Photoshop and then copy other apps. There will be plenty of time for originality later. Now that you’ve got your MVP, sell it. Set up a landing page, or sell it http://www.appsumo.com/wantrepreneurs-business-blueprint/ – but get actual orders, not just email signups! As Tim Ferriss put it in The 4 Hour Workweek: To get an accurate indicator of commercial viability, don’t ask people if they would buy – ask them to buy. The response to the second is the only one that matters. This is a more design-driven approach that pretty much anyone can do by themselves - you don't need a team of skilled people standing behind your idea. More on this in my post: http://www.designforfounders.com/app-idea/

You can start with building a web app instead of native mobile apps to test your idea. Would be a lot cheaper and way faster to develop. You can build a web app that feels and acts exactly like a native app which works on browsers instead of an App Store build.You can simply test your idea and see if people are really interested in this service. If it scales and if people really dig your idea then you can always sink in more money and build the native apps around it. Or better you can show your results to investors and get funded to build your mobile app since you have proof that your idea is generating users/interest. Its a lot easier to get funding once you have some results to show.I have seen many entrepreneurs investing all their money into their app idea only to shut the whole business down after a year or so since their idea never picked up.If you still want to build a native app then I suggest building an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) first to test the market before investing into a full product.If you want to learn more about MVP's and how to validate your app idea before investing a lot of money into an app take a look at this https://www.kogimobile.com/blog/how-to-validate-your-mobile-app-idea/%20(https://www.kogimobile.com/blog/how-to-validate-your-mobile-app-idea/). It should give you an idea of what I am talking about.Now, if you already made up your mind about your mobile app and its development time you should consider the following steps before writing any code:1-) Market Research2-) Plan your app right3-) Understanding/Knowing your Audience4-) Early User Feedback5-) Considering Minimum Viable Product (MVP)These steps are crucial if you are planing to build a serious app since you will run into a lot of problems if you do not plan things right from the beginning. Mistakes during the coding stage will cost you time and money if you don't plan things right.If you want to learn more about the 5 steps mentioned above and Important Things to Consider Before Building you Mobile App you can take a look at these articles. That should give you an idea what app development process looks like besides the development stage. http://%2A%20https//www.kogimobile.com/blog/5-things-to-consider-before-building-a-mobile-app/%20(https://www.kogimobile.com/blog/5-things-to-consider-before-building-a-mobile-app/) http://%2A%20https//www.kogimobile.com/blog/8-things-to-plan-for-before-developing-your-mobile-app/%20(https://www.kogimobile.com/blog/8-things-to-plan-for-before-developing-your-mobile-app/ Overall you need a solid strategy and a solid plan not to waste time and money on development. Once you plan everything then development stage will be a lot more smoother.

Talk with users. Find 5-10 people from each segment you want to monetize (If you know who your target audience is - be honest with yourself) and ask about: - Goals & Motivations - Pain Points - Objections - Perceived Value You can summarize the findings quantitatively in an Exel spreadsheet. At UsabilityTools we're using this simple framework: You can create personas afterwards to summarize the findings (http://blog.usabilitytools.com/five-steps-to-create-personas-with-real-life-data). Hope this helps!

Depends on whether it's a B-to-C idea or a B-to-B idea. B-to-B ideas tend to exist in the context of other applications and technologies, within the company's workflow. Talking to the target customer base extensively helps gauge viability. B-to-C ideas may or may not exist in the context of other offerings. If they do, then users of related technologies can help validate/ invalidate. If it's a far out there new concept, you may need to put it out there and start marketing, getting users, and validating by launching. In either case, laser sharp positioning is one of the key techniques for not getting false positives and false negatives.

There are a lot of different methods you can use help understand the demand for a new app idea. They all have their strengths and weaknesses and no one technique will give you all the answers. It's always best to test your idea using a few different approaches.Advertise and track responsesA popular method for validating business ideas online is the advertise and track approach. This involves setting up a landing page that explains your business, purchasing some online ads and monitoring the number of clicks and emails you get. StrengthsThis is the approach https://seedling.io/ uses to help people test ideas, I like it because you get some very realistic data on your idea. You can generate a good amount of data, so you can be sure your results aren’t a fluke. It also gives you some insight into the financial feasibility of your idea by allowing you to calculate a rough cost per conversion.WeaknessesThis approach also has a few caveats worth mentioning. Advertising and tracking an idea involves a lot of different variables—the idea itself, the layout of the landing page, the graphics used and how the advertising is set up. The problem is that you have no idea whether the response to an idea is down to the quality of the idea or down to something else, e.g., how well the advertising was executed or whether the graphics used were particularly good or bad.Additionally, unless you use a third party tool you have no benchmarks to tell you how good your response rate is. For example, if your idea’s conversion rate is 1%, it’s difficult to know whether that validates your idea.Finally, it doesn't tell you why people like or dislike your idea. So while this approach tells you what is going on, it doesn't really give you any ideas on how to improve it. SurveyAnother popular approach to validating business ideas is running a survey. Surveys that help with the validation of ideas come in lots of different forms, from simple Typeform questionnaires to more complex concept tests. The type of survey you run depends on the sort of validation you’re seeking. Typically, the survey will collect some demographic and attitudinal information on the person taking it, ask about the person’s current pain points and solutions in the market you operate and ask the person to rate the idea.StrengthsSurveys can be easy to set up and can collect large amounts quantifiable data. You can also get into much more detail than you can with just the advertise and track approach.WeaknessesSurveys are time-consuming for the people taking part. Even a short survey can take a person 5-10 minutes to complete—eons in internet time. Thus, it can be difficult to get a sample size large enough to draw any conclusions.To increase the number of people completing your survey, you can offer people an incentive for completing, e.g., a gift voucher. This will increase the amount of data you get, but that doesn’t mean it’s good data. Sometimes people speed through surveys just to get the incentive.Additionally, getting survey questions right is tricky. It’s easy for people to misinterpret both the questions and the accuracy of their answers. For example, surveys often ask questions like, “How likely are you to purchase ‘x product’ when it’s available?” Often, the answers people give to questions like these are just guesses. They really have no idea how likely they are to purchase a product in the future. https://seedling.io/blog/should-i-use-a-survey-to-validate-my-idea. 1-on-1 interviewsAnother idea validation technique is to reach out to potential customers over email and schedule around 10 face-to-face or Skype interviews. Interviews tend to range from 10 minutes to an hour. Questions often ask people about their needs in general, see what their pains are with currently available solutions and involve a discussion around what your idea would need to do to help them.Strengths1-on-1 interviews are great for understanding why people dislike existing solutions and why they may be interested in your idea.WeaknessesQualitative interviews like these don’t scale very well. It can be difficult to find enough people and enough time to get the hundreds of responses you need to come to any reliable conclusions. What may be true for the few people you interview may not be true for your hundreds, thousands or millions of potential customers in the world. Scaling qualitative research is something we've worked on for awhile and are trying to solve with tools like http://lookingjar.com/. Desk researchAnother less used approach is desk research, which is great for understanding whether a market exists for your idea. You can use tools like Amazon’s top sellers, Google Trends, Topsy and Ahrefs to search for products like yours and people who have used similar products. These searches can tell you whether demand for a product like yours already exists and what people think of existing similar products.StrengthsDesk research is useful because it occurs naturally and is free from being biased by your research questions, which often occurs with surveys, interviews and landing pages.WeaknessesWhile desk research is useful for understanding your market overall, it cannot give you any data that's specific to your business idea.Data quality Ensuring data quality is a never ending battle and no dataset is perfect. But in general: Make sure you have enough data to draw some generalizable conclusions. Try and control different variables. For example, if your testing different price points for your app, don't also change the name of the app in the same test. Make sure you get a diverse sample amongst your target audience. For example, if you have a shopping app for the USA don't just talk to people in New York about it. Hope this helps and good luck,Richard