How to validate a product idea and make your next launch a triumph

Since ideas are cheap, I’ll happily share one of my latest product ideas that I never acted upon (and never will).

I grew up eating salmonberries, which look like orange-colored and sometimes fiery red blackberries, every June when they ripened. They have a tart, grapefruit-y taste, and most people wouldn’t even know they exist were it not for a video game called Stardew Valley.

Selling gourmet salmonberry jam always struck me as a cool idea, and a basic Google search shows that nobody’s really been doing this. (They’ve got cloudberry, salal berry, and jostaberry, but no salmonberry!?) Fantasizing costs me nothing, but if I were to try to spin this idea into an actual brand, the costs could add up fast. I’d have to ask myself some important questions first.  

• Are enough people hungering for a new type of jams or filling?
• Could I successfully market the salmonberry as a superfood?
• Could the salmonberry’s culinary history among Pacific Northwest native peoples intrigue more curious buyers?
• Is it feasible to grow, transport, and process enough salmonberries to scale up as needed?
• Would enough people actually like the taste? (Reddit research indicates that these are not people's favorite berries.)

These are all product idea validation questions, and they’re critical for determining whether it’s wise to shell out thousands or even millions for a product launch. Here, we’ll look at how to validate a product idea and get a sense of its product-market fit and staying power.

What is product idea validation?

Product idea validation involves determining whether or not your concept will have enough market demand to make your product launch a success. It combines market research with concept testing to get a comprehensive picture of your target customer base, your competitive positioning, and your product’s ability to satisfy a strong customer need.

You’ll also need to consider the feasibility of manufacturing your products and sourcing the necessary ingredients or raw materials. Nobody’s farming salmonberries, so my jam concept has a lot of question marks here. However, just because something’s not currently being grown at scale, doesn’t mean it can’t be.

Determining how to source niche ingredients at scale was part of the product validation process of West African food brand Yolélé. Yolélé specializes in a “super grain” called fonio, which has been cultivated in Africa for thousands of years but remains unfamiliar to most of the U.S. market.

Yolélé also did concept testing with Highlight to see whether there was an appetite for this “new” grain and gauge purchase intent for a few different fonio products (cheese puffs, plant-based milk, and chocolate energy bars). The results helped steer the company’s near-term direction for choosing manufacturing partners and honing messaging.

What are the steps in validating product ideas?

Determining whether a product concept has sustainable market demand isn’t easy, especially when it’s something people aren’t already familiar with. People might not know they have a need for something until you put it in front of their eyes—the “build it and they will come” phenomenon.

But there’s no guarantee they’ll come if you build it; you have to do research and clever testing to find out. There’s a lot to consider, so here’s a quick roadmap to give you some direction.

• Define your target market. 

One thing to note is that narrowing your target market can actually help you sell more product if it lets you appeal more strongly to a specific group. Plant-based meat company Fable Food Co tested its mushroom burger patties with a variety of hyper-niche groups, targeting not just health-conscious eaters but also people who consider themselves “plant-forward” or “meat-forward.”.

• Analyze existing demand. 

Once you’re confident you’re focusing on the right people, you can analyze demand by sending out surveys, keeping tabs on social media discussions related to your industry (“social listening”), and tracking pertinent search terms. If you’re really motivated, you could run ads that take people to a “Coming Soon” landing page and see how many people express interest.

• Check out your soon-to-be competitors. 

How many competing products are in your niche, and how do you stack up against them? Doing a competitive analysis along with product benchmarking can help you discover ways to stand out and satisfy customer needs that others aren’t quite meeting.

• Create and test a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). 

A crucial step in product innovation is to create a bare-bones version of your product and test it with real customers who fully represent the diversity of your target customer base. Whether you’re developing cleaning supplies or personal care products, getting feedback from regular people using your product in their own homes—a process known as in-home usage testing, or IHUT—is critical.

Product validation methods that cover all the bases

When you’re considering how to validate a product idea for market demand, it’s important to note that a single testing method probably won’t cut it. You’ll want to apply a range of product testing methods, including quantitative (countable, as in product ratings) and qualitative (open-ended feedback) approaches.

You can get direct customer feedback through:

• Surveys
• In-depth interviews
• Focus groups
• Video reviews

Certain product categories require specific validation techniques. For instance, a taste test panel can be an important way to garner valuable feedback on food and beverage products, whereas many personal care and beauty products will require a technique that enables longitudinal testing, or testing over a lengthy period of time.

People are showing interest … but will they pay?

You don’t want to go through the whole rigamarole of launching and hyping up a product only to find that people think it’s cool—but not compelling enough for them to actually spend money on it.

This is why it’s especially important to mitigate bias in your product testing research, since bias is what could give you an unrealistically rosy picture of your prospects. Bias is rampant in research methods like focus groups, where participants often feel subconscious pressure to tell moderators what they want to hear.

To minimize the impact of bias and figure out whether people really will pay, you’ll want to use a method that supports honest, unfiltered feedback from people using your minimum viable product in a comfortable, familiar setting (most likely, their homes). In-home usage testing is an excellent way to remove the influence of the moderator and get a clearer sense of what people think your product is worth.

Also, as we mentioned before, you can gauge interest (including willingness to pay) by having a “Coming Soon” page—perhaps with a pre-order button—that people will reach after clicking on one of your ads.

How to validate product ideas faster—with better insights

Product idea validation isn’t a one-and-done thing; it’s a continuous process. When you’re getting ready to launch a product, there are so many ways to veer off course without realizing it. It’s a bit like the Cave of Wonders in Aladdin—touch one jewel, and it’s game over.

Continuous, iterative consumer product testing is the way to keep yourself on track. If I were serious about my salmonberry jam idea, I would need to validate it from the initial spark of genius all the way through the finished product, complete with packaging, messaging, and a proposed price tag.

Highlight helps companies integrate their product validation efforts with agile development cycles by removing the long wait for data. We know that companies have a need for speed, and we make sure to avoid being a bottleneck in your process so that you can incorporate real customer feedback into your sprints easily and often.

You can see this in the Fable Food case study. They didn’t have time to beat around the bush, so we made sure they had data they could use within two weeks.

Here’s a quick summary of what makes Highlight’s IHUT platform so good at getting you quality data quickly:

1. A ready-to-go community of testers. Highlight’s incredible community of vetted product testers are completely diverse in all ways but one—they ALL love to give detailed, honest feedback about products.
2. An easy-to-use summarizing tool. Trying to find common themes amid piles of detailed, open-ended responses to survey questions? Use Highlight’s AI-based summary feature to clarify qualitative feedback.
3. Turnkey logistics, including product blinding. With Highlight, you won’t need to plan out the complicated process of blinding products and sending them to people. We’re veterans here, and we’ll make it quick and easy.
   
   

The simplest, most cost-effective way to validate your next product idea

With streamlined logistics, AI summarization, and a dedicated product testing community, Highlight allows you to validate your product idea with every decision or change you undertake.  

Getting the right data doesn’t have to be your job. With a solution you can trust, you can focus on using the data to determine what to do with your impending product launch.