How to Validate a New Product

A lot of people may not think about validating their products.  They think about an idea, and before doing much research they put time and money into the creation of the new product just to launch it and see it fail.  This happens in all businesses, from bakeries to movie studios.

But what can you do to make sure that when you release a new product it does not fail.  Well these four ideas can help you validate your products before you release them.
 

• The first thing you want to do to validate a new product is check the idea with your customer base.  One of our earlier post was about finding your Target Market.  If you know who your target market is you can ask them about the idea by sending out a survey.  If you keep a mailing list of people who are part of your target market, you can use it on occasions such as this.  Or you can ask your customers via social media.
  • If you have a brick and mortar business you can ask buyers when they are making a purchase, what they think of your new product idea.

 

• Check your competition to see if they have a similar product.  Chances are the product you want to produce is out there, or almost there.  Knowing how the competition is doing with the same, or a similar product can give you some idea of how your potential product might go over

 

• If you are not sure you will have the extra funds to get the new product to market you can try crowd-sourcing.  Systems like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo can be used to pre-sale your new product, and let you know if people want it.  This will also give you the funds to produce the new product and give you an idea of how popular it could be.

 

• Finally, consider doing a small run of your new product to see how it does.  With a small run you do not have to worry about sinking a large amount of money into the project.  Make twenty to thirty and see how long it takes to sell them.  If they disappear quickly you got a good thing going, but if they take months you will want to reconsider.  I personally saw a business I worked for a number of years back drop a large sum of money on what they thought was a great product idea.  Nearly fifteen years later they are still trying to sell the ten gross of the product they had created.

If you got that new idea, get out there with it, but be careful, if you don't do some research a single idea could bring you down.

Good Luck and Good Sales.