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Discovering the right users for a SaaS product.
Hi all! My name is Tasos, I am a web app developer & entrepreneur. I have a quick question that has been challenging me over the last few weeks. Let's assume you have an idea for a SaaS product. How do you go about validating if other people have the problem that you are trying to solve if you do not really know who your target user is? Do you just ask random people? Isn't that quite wrong to do? Is there a process to actually validate it fast when you have no idea who your target customer is? Thanks a lot folks!
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Surender Singh
Create a basic click-through demo of the product on Figma. Broadly club your potential customers in loose persons. Reach out to 4-5 people from each persona. Show them what you have built and ask them probing questions about their life, problem they face, how they currently solve their problem. Talk to Listen ratio should be 20:80.
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@surender_singh Ok that is interesting thanks a lot. A couple of questions tho. When you say club them in loose persons? u mean categorize them in personas? Also what is the talk to listen ration u said?
@tasos_valtinos yes, Personas. By Talk to listen i mean you should be speaking less compared to the person you are talking to. Don't try to sell your idea. Ask what problems they face and how they resolve it currently.
Create a bunch of CPC ads targeted at different interests / groups, run them for a week or two, see what gets better CTR. Gather emails, ask them for a quick interview, ask them who they are and what they liked in your ad.
@tasos_valtinos Yes, and you'll have to get 1000's of visitors to get 10's or 100's of registrations to get a few interviews. And then... you don't see what these people have in common, because there are still too few of them.
I'm in the same situation now.
@artem_smirnov1 True! And to be honest I am actually in the previous stage. Trying the last 2 weeks to discover a problem to solve, but i cannot find a decent one, and Im looking everywhere any ideas on how to do it.
Thanks for raising this question. I'm having the same struggle. How to validate the validators.
Spread the word. Find people who share your passion. Follow them, learn from them and most importantly help them.
Even if you're existing audience or the people that are close to are not your specific target audience, they might be able to help you to get closer to your target audience. For instance, if your followers on social media are not per se the audience you're building for, they can still provide get feedback and their interest or excitement can help you to connect with your target audience.
If you’re or you’ve face similar challenges in the past, that’s the first way to validate, then you can run some surveys… just my thoughts though
Targeting the wrong people for validating your tests is just as bad as not validating them in the first place. I usually choose my participants based on set criteria and how appropriate they would be to validate the tests. Here are some of the pointers:
Conduct screening to only include the right demographics: Include a series of multiple-choice questions and shortlist users representing your ideal target group. Also, try and include people who are both familiar and unfamiliar with your product for a more genuine review.
Accessibility factor: You should also consider how certain people with disabilities would interact with the product. To understand this, try and include people with disabilities to give you an honest opinion on the usability.
Avoid experts with the design skillset: By including people who work as professional designers, you would get more of an expert opinion instead of a layman's perspective. This would complicate your testing even more. Therefore it is best to only include people who are completely unrelated to the field.
Keep recruiting new users: Recruiting new users for each testing stage will give you a detailed perspective on how users interact with different layers of design. Participants from previous tests tend to become familiar, so recruiting new users is a solid way of conducting iterative testing.
Personally, I automate this process by using an online tool called @qualaroo . It's a customer feedback tool that you can use to create a screening survey using advanced targeting modes and easily pick out the relevant participants for your testing.
I've been perfectly happy with it for the past six months, and my product testing has also shown some great improvements. Hope it helps.