8 Best Ways to Validate Your App Idea

So, a great startup app idea came to your mind. But what actions to take next? How to transform it into reality and become prosperous in the market? 

The first stage of turning your startup idea into a software product is validating the app idea. Nobody wants to spend time and money on software that is unnecessary for the target audience. 

Research shows that the main reason startups fail is their uncompetitiveness in the market and lack of value for the targeted users. Most businesses start to develop their products when they believe that they are outstanding and future-oriented. However, during the development process, the idea turns out to be unsuitable or not worth all the costs and effort.

The validation of startup ideas, especially when it comes to mobile apps, is critical to ensure that your product will be demanded and gain market success. It is a demanding and complex process that requires pre-development research, defining your values and goals, creating a minimum viable product, etc.

8 Best Ways to Validate an App Idea

Pay attention to the most effective strategies to efficiently validate a startup idea before moving on to mobile app development.

1. Define the size of your potential market

This is the primary and the most important move in app idea validation. Even if your software is going to resolve an urgent problem, it’s no use when there are few people in your intended audience. While determining how many people would use your software product, pay attention to its marketing and monetization strategies. These are the most meaningful aspects that influence the size of your future audience. You can do keyword research or look for specialized communities and forums. Also, research similar products available in app stores to figure out how popular they are. 

2. Create a potential user persona

After you confirm that the demand for your product is large enough, you should find out more about your audience. Using market analysis, you can create a few proto personas of your users. By doing this, you can get to know your clients and predict better whether your software meets their needs. This step is essential to realize the objectives and find optimal ways to motivate them to purchase your product. Generating user personas will also help to determine the primary difficulty your application is going to deal with. 

3. Build a brand image

Now that you know who will utilize your product, it’s time to discover what is unique about your brand. Building a brand identity is a time-consuming and demanding process, but its benefits will outweigh the challenging process in the long run. A unique and appealing brand image is helpful in remaining competitive and adding value to your services. Make your target users realize your worth for solving their problems. A USP always increases awareness and result in increased profit. If you pay attention to your brand identity beforehand, reaching the audience will become much easier from a long-lasting perspective.

4. Research the existing solutions

Don’t underestimate the significance of competitor research for successful app validation. Defining their strengths and flaws will help you properly adjust to the market needs to reach the audience more wisely and cover their problems more precisely. You can also see how their product versions upgraded in the past and what changes they implemented. Analyzing competitors will help you determine the optimal tech stack for your solution. Consider that most products in one industry use similar technologies. With so many technologies available, making the right choice becomes a challenge for startup companies. 

5. Develop an MVP

An MVP approach aims not only to validate a startup idea but also to save overall effort. The essence of this approach is relying on the valuable feedback of early customers. An MVP version includes only a basic feature set, so the team saves time on delivering it to users instead of building the whole functionality. This approach also speeds up your time-to-market, which is essential for highly competitive industries. An MVP allows you to test your app in real conditions and adjust it to perfectly fit the target audience’s needs. 

6. Outline the user journey

If you are eager to know how to validate your app idea and monetization approach right away, create a plan for the client journey and determine the essential steps. Without this, it is hard to predict the interaction with your startup. Developing this map from the user’s viewpoint will help you see the complete picture. According to it, you eliminate the distracting elements and focus their attention on the benefits. It will also play a crucial role in creating the most advantageous design of your software and making the interface more functional and intuitive.

7. Create a coming soon page

To boost interest, you could build a page that introduces your software to future users. You can turn to it before or after the MVP development, relying on your unique goals and timeline. It will ensure that you have a significant demand and generate early leads by including notifications to the users once the product is ready. They can subscribe to news and updates about your product. This page can help you run the first campaigns on social media and get even more engagement. This page can become a trampoline to your effective marketing campaign. 

8. Submit the basic version to the review websites

This is another method of idea validation for your app based on reviews. Platforms like AngelList or ProductHunt can provide you with considerably more data about competitors and situations and present you with deeper insight into the freshest business trends. 

Final Thoughts

In a fast-paced world, nothing can guarantee your startup product success. However, following the eight tips to validate your app idea from this article will help you bypass common traps and present a high-level product that perfectly fits the market needs.