5 Signals to Easily Validate Your Signature Product Idea

Building the right solution, marketing plan or even brand position is hard. Mostly because the new influx of people is making the creator economy wobbly.

In doing all that, we see people make the mistake of building the wrong solution for the right problem.

Yes, you’ve studied your customers, yes, you’ve done your market research and you have some ideas as to what problems your people face.​

But that is just primary research – You collected that data yourself. However the internet is a collection of consciousnesses, you can find more buried data beyond just interviews.​

If you haven’t done your primary research, check out 5 Steps to Study Your Customer

I’ll show you 5 signals you can examine to validate your idea and find the edge your product needs.

But first, let’s figure out where people fail.

Bad Interpretation

What people claim to be market research these days is just

• Curating data
• Finding the most common units
• Using them to build up whatever they are trying to

We are surrounded by data but starved for insights

~ Jay Baer, Marketing and Customer Experience expert

Without proper interpretation, you end up with

• already existing solutions or position
• the wrong solution to the right problems
• improper offer-intent fit

All this happens because people take data and research at its face value without questioning its significance.

Plus sometimes investing in market research isn’t always an option when you are just starting out with your product or ecosystem. But there is no way around it.

Although I make this sound complicated I assure you it is not as terrifying as it seems. I’ve done it a bunch of times before, but I’ll show you the most recent example of mine so you get some context.

Here’s the signals I look for

I assume that, at this point, you want to build a product and have some general ideas on what your audience’s problems are. If not, go and study your people before you take this step.

Consultations or 1:1 calls are just primary research to help you gather insights on a larger scale leading us to secondary research… Targeting signals.

And by that, I mean looking for these signs

Signal 1: Question

The first thing you need is questions from people, it’s important because they show demand for a problem.

The more questions you can find, the better your validation of the idea will get. So you are not necessarily looking for what problems people are facing in that particular issue, you are looking if they are even searching for it.

You can find questions in Tweets, Reddits, Organic Google Searches even YOUTUBE AMAs.

Signal 2: Complain

This is how you know what people don’t like about the solutions that already exist.

You don’t need a lot of them, even a few will do the job and give you an edge for differentiating your solution in the market.

Signal 3: Review

People who build products often collect reviews and testimonials because it builds credibility.

But for us, this is an opportunity to learn what people like about the product, more accurately, you want to know if it’s the format, the content, the tools… basically the makeup of the product.

Because you don’t want to give people something that they are unfamiliar with in usage.

Signal 4: Summarizations

Be it webinars, courses, or mini-courses, you can find Twitter threads or newsletter issues about anything these days.

While they help the builder promote their success, and the writer promotes their participation, they will help you uncover otherwise hidden insights.

So look out for research-style material in YouTube, Newsletters, Blog Posts, Twitter Threads, Instagram Carousel, Forums, and Groups.

Signal 5: Reports

Every year, the big players and companies put out trend reports for the world to read. Convert Kit does them, HubSpot has some, and Thinkific puts some out.

These reports are a treasure trove for data-driven results and large-scale surveys on the behavior of the market.

You can combine everything you learn from all these points with your primary research to pull out

How I use this data.

Once I collect any significant insight I see fit, I test it against my Product idea with my own filters like

1. Are enough people talking about this?
2. Can my product tackle those grievances?
3. Is there elements can I add to my product that people would want, but don’t make me stray from my leading philosophy?
4. What kind of a structure do people expect and is my product familiar with the format?
5. Does my product structure align with the market behavior?

You can ask many sub-questions to this main overarching theme and go deeper to find the perfect feature combination for your product that people would pay for and adopt the philosophy of.

Final Words

People are giving out signals all the time for what they prefer to work with, and it’s easy to find them. But I’m not gonna lie, it takes time and a lot of grunt work for anyone who is doing it.

So a quick recap of the sources

1. Questions
2. Complain
3. Review
4. Summarizations
5. Report

I hope this makes segmenting your research easier.

A Pro tip: Maintain a spreadsheet or notion database so you can find the most common data points as often as you can so that later you can use them as angles for marketing.

If you want to cut to the chase and all the pressure of figuring everything out the complex details and roadmap, check out the INFO PRODUCT BUILDER KIT. A complete plug-and-play pack of roadmaps, worksheets, and templates to help you build your first or signature info product in a matter of weeks.