I wish I had that service when I was starting out

I’ve had great feedback since the launch of our new Market Fit proposition.

I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised as I prototyped and tested the service using the same tools and processes that we have now made available to you.  And having refined and iterated the service we were confident that there was a real problem to be solved, there wasn’t any competing solutions on the market, we understood the customer groups, their needs, and verified they were willing to pay to solve their issue.

Off the back of last week’s launch, we have already delivered the service to a corporate innovation team.  They were looking to truly understand their target customer’s, gain insights and ultimately validate that their proposed solution was solving a genuine problem.  The good news for them is we delivered the results in four days and their proposed solution was significantly validated.

But some of the best feedback came from a start-up founder that I regularly catch up with.  He has been in market for two years and growing significantly both in New Zealand and internationally and by every measure he is a successful start-up entrepreneur.

I was testing Market Fit on him and his feedback was pure gold. So good, I’m just going to leave it in his words:

1. [When we started] We asked CEO’s, GMs, heads of marketing etc. from 12 different businesses whether they’d use (and pay for!) the concept.  Thankfully 11 said yes.  Problem was they’re all from my network – hardly impartial.  This would’ve given me much more confidence (and constructive feedback) had the audience been larger, more targeted, less friendly.
2. Describing the proposition – I’m still uncomfortable about how we describe our concept.  I re-write it at least fortnightly.  If you’ve got a systematic method for generating and A/B testing various descriptions against different audiences, that’d be gold!!
3. Both points above feed into the angel/seed investment conversation.  For them, I need a couple of things that aren’t trivial to product.
   1. Market sizing – this is still a bit vague for me.  Can you simply size and value different customer segments?
   2. Target segments – who’s my buyer?  what do they look/smell/sound like?  Love to see some profiling based on who’s clicked on the ads.
   3. Validation means getting someone to buy which is tough if no product exists yet.  But can you interview the target buyers to qualify the problem is real, validate whether the thing fixes it and quantify it’s cost to them or value of a solution.
4. Prioritising features – I had a hunch on the 2-3 things that would make a genuine difference to the customer and get us out in front competitively but it would have been better had I got a view of the relative importance or weighting – save me time building the wrong stuff!
5. Getting in front of ‘real’ customers.  Too tempting (but not totally wrong) to sell into my own network and defer testing the actual marketing techniques that need to scale and be repeatable.

Powerful stuff.

If you would like to understand how Market Fit can help you find customer validated answers to your most difficult challenges jump online and book a market validation call – we will spend 45 minutes mapping a custom strategy to your proposition.

KS

PS:  People seem to love the Market Fit name, yes we tested that as well 🙂