Product Development
Validate your product idea with real shoppers before you go to market, uncover issues early, and learn who your actual buyer is.
Product Development
Validate your product idea by showing shared pictures via Dropbox or a shared Google Drive link. Uncover any issues before you go to market.
The question this answers
Validate my product idea and uncover any issues.
What shoppers are asked
Shoppers see your options and are asked to pick one and explain why:
You'll be looking at a product in development and answering questions about it.
They then answer these out loud on camera:
- Who do you think would buy something like this?
- If you could change anything about this product, what would it be and why?
- Name 3 potential issues you see with this product.
How to set it up
This section is a stub. Write the step-by-step setup, what a good variation looks like, and how to read the result, then change status: seed to status: published in the front matter.
How to read the result
The valuable output is the list of problems, not the enthusiasm. Shoppers are polite about prototypes. Discount praise heavily and weight every specific concern, because specificity is the signal that someone actually engaged.
The 'who would buy this' answers matter more than the rest. If shoppers consistently describe a different buyer than the one you're building for, that's the single most important thing this test can tell you, and it's far cheaper to learn now than after your first production run.
Three named issues from one shopper beats ten compliments from five. Look for the concern that recurs across responses; that's the one that will show up in your reviews.
Nobody able to say what it's for is a positioning failure, and no amount of packaging will fix it. Better to hear it here.
What to do next
- Brand Name Test - name it once you know who it's for
- Perfect Insert Test - plan the post-purchase offer before you print packaging
- Popular Pick Test - see what you'll be competing against on the shelf