Create characters that represent your current and potential customers
Determine the problem or objective of your research
Collect information through primary or secondary research methods
Empathy-Driven Conversations When talking to potential customers, prioritize understanding their challenges over pitching ideas or hypothetical features. Open-ended questions like, “What is the hardest part about doing X?” or “Tell me about the last time you faced this problem,” encourage users to share genuine experiences.
Listen actively, allowing users to provide detailed insights into their pain points. These empathy-driven interviews uncover real problems, helping you determine whether your idea addresses a significant need.
Iterative Validation Process To validate demand, start small:
Test your interview approach with yourself or friends.
Reach out to a broader audience through cold calls, emails, or in-person visits.
Gathering and analyzing these early insights helps refine your idea, ensuring it aligns with market needs and justifies pursuing it further.
Validating demand ensures your idea solves a real problem. Start by sharing your concept with trusted individuals to identify strengths and gaps. Expand your research by conducting interviews, surveys, or direct outreach to potential customers.
Gathering feedback reveals whether your idea resonates with its audience and addresses widespread needs. This process helps refine your solution, aligning it with real-world expectations. Early insights guide your decision to pursue or adjust your idea.
Understanding your market helps you focus on the right audience and accurately assess your opportunity. Broad products may require feedback from 100+ people, while niche markets may only need input from a smaller, targeted group.
Market sizing combines bottom-up and top-down analyses. Bottom-up starts with small-scale data, like customer numbers and pricing, and scales up. Top-down narrows from the total addressable market (TAM) to a realistic serviceable addressable market (SAM).
Developing a clear target audience is essential. Define demographics like age and location, along with psychographics such as values, interests, and buying behaviors. This clarity ensures your product aligns with market needs.
Consider how you plan to connect with your target audience. What methods will you use to ensure you’re getting firsthand, relevant information?
Your target audience can be determined by developing customer personas and then identifying the channels that would best allow you to reach those customers.
Think about how you’ll approach conversations with potential users to gather meaningful insights. What questions can you use to prioritize listening over pitching?
Reflect on how you’ll analyze and apply the insights from your conversations. What will your process be for adjusting your idea based on what you learn?
Inbound marketing focuses on creating and distributing content to attract people to a website. Inbound marketing is effective for B2C and when customers are familiar with the products and services offered. Outbound marketing focuses on reaching out to consumers and educating them about a product and how it addresses a problem. Outbound marketing resembles traditional advertising.
A GTM strategy is a plan outlining how to deliver a product or service to your target customers with a competitive advantage. You need to define your target audience, define what makes your product unique (your value proposition), look at the competitive landscape and define how to position your product within that landscape, and come up with a pricing strategy/revenue model (e.g., freemium). A GTM strategy will also definitively set customer acquisition channels and customer retention methods. Along the way, you should define the key metrics that will help you measure success (to figure out whether your methods are working) for each of these elements.
