4 ways to validate customer demand for your product or ...

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1. Try this when using leading engagement data to validate demand for your offering: “Break down what your ideal users need to do to achieve value” Consider whether this [action] is a task or a completion of a workflow (e.g. does it reflect someone completing a core action to extract value?)

   In Problem and use-case fit

2. Considerations when looking at the flat retention curve “Talk to someone friendly in the product team and ask them to delve into the data and see how different user groups are engaging with your product.” Consider the aha moments for your product journey. After you’ve got the data for your segments (however you want to splice it up) look at their experience map. Are you directing them to the part of what you offer as soon as you can? Or are you making them jump through hoops? It’s okay to have a different onboarding sequence for different segment journeys as you grow. (Here are some ideas on how to approach your product onboarding).

   In Behavioral segmentation

3. Whilst there’s a lot of info out there on the concept of product-market fit Balfour’s work on using meaningful signals to validate customer demand helped us to understand if we were going in the right direction. More importantly, it helped us to understand if we were focusing on the right things. “In the article, he suggests when looking to hit a good traction rate and reach PMF, your business needs to pass a series of signals made up of quantitative and qualitative indicators.” It’s accepted that these four signals should give you direction and allow you to quickly assess if something needs fixing.

   In Market-entry validation

4. In the article, he suggests when looking to hit a good traction rate and reach PMF, your business needs to pass a series of signals made up of quantitative and qualitative indicators. “It’s accepted that these four signals should give you direction and allow you to quickly assess if something needs fixing.” I recently spoke about my experience with them whilst presenting at a recent startup accelerator workshopsession. It was obvious that talking about their application rather than the theory behind them resonated with organisations looking to launch their new product.

   In Market-entry validation

5. In one particular business, we had a nice number of customers signing up to the platform but our focus seemed to change constantly. And, after a while, I questioned what “good” looked like. “We’d get opinions, we’d get ‘hot takes’, we’d get well-intentioned ideas… but for a while, nothing seemed to work. The metrics or things we were told to focus on never translated into growth.” Then, I came across the work of Brian Balfour and product market fit (PMF).

   In Market-entry validation

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