How to validate your startup app idea?

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Business begins with you having a mobile app idea. If you have an idea that is best according to you, the next question that comes to your mind is how to validate an app ideas? It would be best if you analyzed how the app is going to be. Of course, nobody would like to spend thousands of dollars on an app idea with no market worth. The process of evaluating if your product or app idea is of interest to a particular target group is called market validation. 

Market Validation is a term that is often heard, especially among upcoming entrepreneurs. This process is carried on to know if the app concept is of interest to your target audience or not. How to validate an app ideas has varied stages, including a series of consumer interviews with people in your target market. Before you have made a substantial investment in your product/concept, it almost always takes place. 

Around 45% of startups are struggling because they have not met their target market. To successfully run a startup, you need to systematically validate your concept to make your product competitive in the market. In order to validate any startup concept, there are some essential steps to take. Today let’s have a look at some of the steps that would help you validate your startup ideas and confirm it is competent with real customers or not.

What are the Strategies to Validate Your App Idea?

Market research & validation 

The first thing first is you need to have a business plan. This does not mean you have to put down a project altogether, but you must have an idea to start. Market research helps you to recognize patterns and challenges by consumers in the industry. Not only should we know our customers but a competitor’s research is also necessary. Market Research would help us understand the pros and cons of the concept and validate your startup ideas. 

We usually make a mistake in keeping our ideas to ourselves. Sharing the concepts and taking the right people’s opinions is the initial stage of validating the startup principle. You may take advice on quality from others who are already in the market and ask them specific questions directly or follow active LinkedIn entrepreneurs who have reliable knowledge about a particular industry. 

Before you begin the process of app creation, validation is a significant phase. It allows you to find out your audience’s level of interest, or you could end up wasting thousands of dollars if you do not test your idea first. Market research includes various steps such as. 

Analysis to validate your startup ideas

Analyzing your potential customer and competition is equally important. Know more about the audience’s objectives and what would encourage them to use your app. For your app, create a user persona. A user persona is a fictitious character that your target audience portrays. In your user persona analysis, you can provide information such as age, occupation, industry, work status, and current challenges. The research would help you know that your concept would engage the users or not. 

When we talk about analyzing the competition, one should analyze their business and find some areas they lack as you can focus on those areas. As there are many established competitors in the market, it becomes vital to know your competitors well. You will learn about their errors and how they resolved them by evaluating them and the methods they adopted for success, which can be extended to your startup as well.

Understand the size of your target market

Once you have a plan and have done a proper analysis of the market, the next step comes to understand the target market and its size. It would help if you examined whether your concept is successful and all the time can make the company gain profit from it. If you are about to start a company, it does not make sense if the concept can’t earn a profit. To know the potential for profitability or not of your idea, you need to plan to make your company successful carefully.

One must understand why consumers will select their product compared to other apps available in the market that have similar value while evaluating the business fit of your app concept. 

Know your customer 

You will need to know what you are looking for to create an app that people regularly use. The first step in taking your product to the world is to meet your unique app users. For that, you will need to build users first. In other phases of app development, the benefits of creating users can be seen. Your user base needs to be established to know how your app is being used by users – its favorite features and interfaces, etc.

After identifying the user type that will interact with your application when it begins, you will take the next step in getting your app idea to meet them. This stage plays a crucial role in seeking a response to knowing if your mobile app idea is good. Indeed it is an essential phase of how to validate an app ideas.   

The next move will be to get your app ideas to reach them. This stage is key to seeking an answer regarding how to see if your view of the mobile app is successful if you have found a user form that will communicate with your application as soon as the application begins.

Browse through apps in the App Store           

It can be quite a challenge in itself to figure out your competitions, those who work on the same business model as yours and those that work on your key features, as millions and millions of applications are present in both App Store and Play Store.  

In the top charts and top categories, search applications that concern you to see what issues are solved by other people’s product ideas. Tap the featured applications section and look at the various software types featured by Apple or Google. Apps will be featured in a specific topic several times, such as cooking dinner at home, medical patient apps, or apps to monitor even your time. 

Targeted keyword research

How will you be able to funnel out the audiences which are interested in your app? This step will help you to identify your target audience. A stage that will help you explain I’ve got an application idea where do I begin?

For this tool like Google AdWords or Moz keyword explorer would be a great help. You can select a few phrases or words which you think are related to your app concept, and people might look for it on Google. After which, these tools will help you to see the traction the words are getting. The search volume will tell you whether people are searching for an idea like your application or not. Which will help you to know how successful your app will be and how attractive the concept is in the market. 

The list of keywords that you can generate at this time can be useful in a range of other measures such as ASO or when selling your app outside of the stores. In reality, this step will also help you to find developers for your favorite domain Apps. 

The landing page would help.

Make a landing page for those you met or those you will follow, otherwise known as a single page website, as a record. The idea is to see if someone can connect with your mobile app idea—tracking, easily accessed via the microsite or landing page with the help of MixPanel or Google Analytics. Note also how often Bitly or URLBuilder has clicked the connection for shortening the link.

Other than this, we should include the things that we should have on our landing page: Your application summary, Screenshots, and Type of email sign-up. 

Some idea validation tool that will help you create and share landing page includes: 

  • Creating Softwares – Landingi, Leadpages, Lander, Unbounce, 
  • Designing software – LaunchKit.io, Apple App Store, Mockuuups Studio, Placeit

Upload Minimum Viable Product of your APP on various review websites. This step will give you an actual realization of how your app would perform in the real market. Websites like ProductHunt or AngelList and more would help you submit your app ideas. By updating your concept there, you can find out how the other entrepreneurs would react to it. A Minimum Viable Product is not necessary. Some websites will allow you to access just if you have specific details about your app and its features that are going to be included. One must take the maximum usage of such sites and get an idea about the future app’s potential. 

Now, as we know the How to Validate an App Ideas concept, let’s understand the approaches that can help you validate your app idea. There are three processes, MVP, POC, and Prototype when translating the app design into strategies or forms that can be shared for the world to explore and analyze in-depth.

Steps to Validate Your App Idea

Now let’s look in a little detail at all three methods of how to validate an app ideas.

Proof Of Concept (POC)

Proof Of Concept, also known as evidence of theory, is to implement any process or idea to prove its validity or, in principle, to establish whether specific ideas or theories have their potential functional values or not. 

It is a limited project version, mainly used for the internal distribution of the app concept compared to the others. Usability is not something that, at this point, receives significant publicity.

The goal is to see how the concept looks at itself, at a very basic level, inside a mobile app. It helps mobile app developers understand how much flow needs to be maintained and how long it takes. In reality, POC is the stage where the duration it takes to create a mobile app is of great importance.

Mobile App Prototype

Next comes the mobile app prototype approach. This approach helps in knowing how your concept will function. Although POC’s purpose is to demonstrate that an app can add a feature, Prototype shows its functions. A prototype is essentially an interactive end product model that communicates the application’s navigation and design that can be created using different software.

Your investors will see how their app functions when you show the user experience and provide everyone with the design and layout concept. The main goal is to assess the app’s viability but does not represent a final product by Mobile App Constructors. It makes it easy to suit the solution right from the earliest because it shows the problems at the half-early stage of the mobile app development process.

Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
Minimum Viable Product

When we talk about software development companies or startups themselves, you will often hear about the MVP and Agile Methodologies. You may have a brilliant idea for an app/e-commerce product/platform/mobile device etc. You want this idea to become a reality quickly. 

MVPs are your best way to get an idea for the application. It’s a minimal smartphone application that can be checked around the industry. MVP allows you to understand how the customers communicate with the app precisely. The MVPs’ effect is to recognize users’ pain and have time to get investor funds, while prototyping is helped to address problems that occur at the start of the development process.

This step helps you help to identify:

  • Product Viability 
  • The team made observations about the products
  • Business requirements
  • Effectiveness 

In the end, MVPs provide immediate value while minimizing the costs of mobile apps creation – while allowing you to iterate the app phase stage by step. But here’s what you need to start with validating your concept of mobile apps – stuff you need to get your idea off-the-spot and on the market. In the end, it all depends on how innovative the approach is and how many people your mobile app concept can be validated. An MVP is a good enough product to attract first users. 

The core learnings

When you are in the planning phase, you must always approach the right group of people. First of all, the innovators. Do not approach early adopters until you can explain that your concept is often better and comparatively cheaper than what they do right now.

Establish a feedback loop. Get reviews, iterate and repeat it. You will continue making your goods by attracting more clients, receiving design evidence, and paying the customer for your solution.

Don’t start with all that you are left with! We know that business stories about people who realize their ideas and become successful are appealing, but they need cash to do so. If you dream of a company, you need to be able to invest. You have to focus in the early days on getting ratings, not cash. As mentioned above, the information is an answer to how to validate an app ideas, stuff that would be important to get your project off the ground and on the market. In the end, it all depends on how unique the approach presented is and how many individuals you can meet to validate the concept of your mobile app. Next, you may also like to get some exciting startup app ideas that would help.

FAQs for Validate an App Ideas

How to Validate an App Ideas?

Validating your startup idea begins with defining your goal. After which you can develop a hypothesis. When you’ve defined your goal for idea validation, it’s time to develop a hypothesis based on that goal. You are almost done now keep experimenting and revise. This is how you validate and develop a startup app idea.

What is product validation?

The Product Validation Process shows that within the intended operating environments, the end product meets its investor requirements (MOEs) with validation conducted wherever possible by planned operators and/or users.

What are the key points for product validation?

Major points for product validation includes:

  • Analysys
  • Research the existing demand
  • Know your customers
  • Targeted keyword
  • A landing page
  • Right approach

Which are the questions to validate a business idea online?

Some of the questions that can rise while such as 

  • What issue are you solving?
  • Find the way others attempted to solve this issue, and why have their solutions succeeded or failed?
  • How many unique perks do you list for your product or idea?
  • Way to present your solution

Ways to effectively promote your App idea

It’s a lot of work to come up with a new product or service, which sadly does not end until it’s ready-the other half of the equation is to market and promote your concept. You may be selling the best new product or service around, but you are likely to miss opportunities or even end up losing money down the road if you don’t promote it properly. So research well and come up with new and innovative ways to promote your product.

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Bluein Christian
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Content Writer with experience of 6+ years. Have experience writing content for different industries, such as travel, education, fashion, and more. A creative person by birth and by profession. She loves learning new concepts and creating useful content about them. She loves traveling and is always up for new challenges.

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