What happens when you don’t validate an idea properly and how to avoid it?
Starting a business doesn't have an ideal timing, but a brilliant concept and a promising market opportunity will eventually attract investors. Once you embark on your entrepreneurial journey, it becomes crucial to expedite your entry into the market. But how do you validate your project idea and make sure you reach the right consumers?
Over the past seven years, we have collaborated with over 100 start-ups at various stages of their development and have identified the best approach to launch a new product to the market. From the world's first zero-plastic deodorant refill brand Wild (sold over 6 million refills to date), to award-winning state-of-the-art technology bike Apex Rides (raised £3 million in seed funding) and the world’s first immersive gaming console for Quell (secured over 10,000 pre-orders to date), a successful product launch relies on validation. Here are our insights into how brands such as these have validated their market, design, and supply chain:
Validate the need
The key here is to involve your audience. It’s easy to have an idea, believe that because you think it’s awesome everyone will, and then go straight ahead to developing it. But it’s vital to get your product in front of your target user as early as possible and keep them involved in the process as you develop it.
Firstly, you have to get yourself out there. Without ploughing money into advertising, you want to start by leveraging your network, ask them what they think. We conceptualised a biodegradable lateral flow test amidst the pandemic and promoted it through media to start conversations with potential partners and other experts in the field. The most important thing is to get your idea in front of people and be open to their feedback.
Before Wild launched its refillable deodorant, it soft-launched the deodorant in off-the-shelf packaging. It wasn’t sexy, the goal at this stage wasn’t to make money, but it enabled them to validate if the natural formula worked before committing over £100k to develop bespoke packaging. The start-up involved these early users regularly into the design process to test, review, and feedback on the refill pack design as it took shape. For the offer of little more than a year's free deodorant they were able to get scores of willing test subjects keen to support them.
Validating the feasibility
Validating the feasibility typically means ‘can it be done at a cost that is viable for the business?’. You only need to scroll through a list of the biggest Kickstarter failures to see that the common denominator is their misguidance on the true cost of developing and manufacturing the product before taking pre-orders. This could either be through ignorance, or denial. In most cases we will never know, but the outcome is the same; they were never successful.
Ensuring that your idea is possible to manufacture seems like an obvious and simple thing to validate. You can start by consulting an experienced technologist, engineer, or manufacturer (and listen to them) or bring expertise in-house. However, I’d also like to add another question here: ‘does the benefit this product brings to a person or society justify the impact of developing and making it?’.
Producing any physical product has an impact on the world. Whether it’s through the resources required, the energy in production or the emissions generated through use. We can no longer prioritise profit over the planet and any start-up that believes otherwise will find itself faced with consumer backlash, legislation barriers and pressure from investors in the future.
Validating the market
One of the best ways to get really good feedback on your start-up, particularly if you are concerned about IP, is to pitch to investors. Who better to get feedback from than those who spend their lives reviewing, working with, and putting money into start-ups? And I can guarantee one of the first questions they will ask is ‘how many customers do you have lined up?’.
Again, the most important thing is to get your product out there. If you have a B2C consumer product, leverage platforms like Kickstarter, or launch a pre-sales campaign. If you are like Wild, you can soft launch with a ‘placeholder’ product to test the sales strategy, but what do you do if you are developing something more complex, like a new gaming platform for example?
Whilst Quell hasn’t got a product on the market yet, it has been regularly recruiting users to come and play with the early production models. The user-generated feedback has not only been beneficial to the design process but testing days have enabled them to generate marketing content they have used to make pre-sales.
Lastly - remain agile
You can’t just validate your idea, go underground for four years, launch, and expect everything to be just fine. The world changes in that time.
It’s not uncommon for start-ups to rebrand multiple times before they even launch a product on the market as they react to new trends and consumer behaviour. Updating your brand identity is one thing, drastically changing your product halfway through development is another. In most cases once you’ve committed to tooling, it’s just not possible.
The best solution to this is to launch as quickly as possible. The second option is to design-in opportunities to tweak and change your product even after launch.
This isn’t just something that start-ups have to consider. Take the Apple Vision Pro for example. It’s clear that the team at Apple isn’t 100% sure yet where mixed reality is going to really take off. They have launched a product that isn’t really finished, something that’s just enough of a platform for them to experiment with the immersive experience, develop new apps for and push and pull in different directions based on real world feedback.
