By Suhaib Mohammed
After coming up with a great product or service, it is essential to test it in the market and see if your target customers will buy. This is important for two reasons. It saves time and resources, since the founder has a clear understanding of how the market will receive the business offering. Secondly, the results found will give you courage to keep going or change tactics when necessary. Overall, testing your business in the market reduces the chances of failure.
Here are some tips on how to test your product in the market.
Test your assumptions
Your products, services and marketing strategy are all assumptions. Before anything, you need to get out there, meet your prospective customers and tell them about your business. Here, you can find out if your target audience is drawn to your product or service, and are willing to pay a premium based on the value they place on it.
Build a minimum viable product
When testing your assumptions, the next step is to build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Think of MVP as a beta version of your complete product; like a prototype without the full features of the product. The goal for building a minimum viable product is to take the product to the marketplace to test it.
Learn from customer feedback
Once you get your MVP in the market, the next thing to do is to get feedback. How does your customer perceive your product? Are they complaining about the price? What features do they like about your product the most? You must ensure that your business offering is aligned with feedback from your target audience.
Re-strategize
By re-strategizing, you’re simply modifying your product or business model to suit the needs of your prospective customers. Your business offering should be tailored to suit the feedback you have gathered from your customers, ensuring that it appeals to them.
Reiterate
When you reiterate, you’re simply reproducing your end product based on the knowledge you’ve gathered from your customers’ feedback. This means that you’ve validated your initial business assumptions, based on your customers’ experience.
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