So you noticed something – something that was missing, or a problem people have that needs to be solved, or an idea whose time just seems to have come. It didn’t quite take over your mind but it didn’t quite leave you either.

You went about your life doing things you normally do. Then days and perhaps weeks after it surfaced into your consciousness, suddenly one day without warning, inspiration struck and you figured out a solution for it – “What if I…”.

A frenzy followed that. You studied the market and competition, you did some numbers, you tried to get into the user’s head and stay there. Innumerable sketches, ideas on design, ideas on marketing, sleepless nights filled with energy and you got it to the point where you had a basic product in your head, a decent idea of the competition and market, and probably some flowcharts, sketches and/or wireframes.

You now have a rough idea of who you are going to target, you have some idea on how you are going to market it, you are excited! You believe this will work. You believe this is a fantastic opportunity given your timing. You believe this will be big.

You believe?

“Darn! I actually don’t know if this will work!”

So before you bet your money, the next couple of years and what will seem like endlessly stressful days and nights; before you test your sanity and fill every corner of your mind with the effort it will take to realize your vision, you need to validate at least a few of your most critical assumptions. If it seems important and necessary, you’d be right on both counts.

While your experience of coming up with the idea for your product or service may not be exactly what I described above, the next step, which is market testing your idea is not just good practice, it is indispensable. You will need the data from this not just to understand the challenges your product will face, but also to make critical product and growth decisions, build support for the product, establish market proof, raise funding and establish processes needed to continuously improve the product and offering.

Without these, you may end up building an awesome product nobody uses, or worse, one you lose faith in. I’ve seen other founders go through this and also have myself. It is a painful experience and unfortunately happens more commonly with startups, than it perhaps should. In most cases, the founders do begin with a strong vision. But a vision is not enough to turn a great idea into a product or service successful in the market. It needs to be accompanied by tests that help guide your progress.

Before I jump into how you can go about this, let’s first cover what this article does not intend to do.

This article does not explain how you can manage your startup. It does not explain how you can raise funding. It does not try to show you how to put a comprehensive data-driven management framework in place for your startup. It speaks nothing of growth or how to gauge, direct or manage it. It does not explain how you can maintain a product roadmap for any period of time. It does not…well you get the idea. I will include some great resources which cover many of these topics in the last part of this article.

The intent of this article (as the title suggests) is straightforward, quite narrow and completely focused on understanding what kind of a market exists for your idea. My goal here is to help you distill your thoughts in getting your product off the ground, informed of the opportunities and risks, and most importantly in a manner that creates usable data on which you can base your decisions.

In order to demonstrate how we can put some of the more abstract ideas discussed into practice, I’ve created a fictitious case of Aria, an aspiring entrepreneur who as you’ll learn is trying to create a new kind of guitar.

Most of my experience comes from building software products and services, so there is bound to be a bias in the methods outlined here towards those kinds of products. But you should be able to apply these to any industry, as you will see in the case used here. This article draws heavily from the Lean Startup methodology, industry cases, and my experiences. I believe in experimenting to learn, constant improvement, and a healthy dose of skepticism. This article hopefully demonstrates all of these. Naturally, I’d appreciate any feedback on how I can make it more relevant and/or useful.

Onward!

TO BE CONTINUED..