Startup founders and leaders in the healthcare, nonprofit, government and research sectors have great app ideas. However, they often have little to no knowledge about how to validate their app ideas in the market, both as products and commercial businesses. To help with this common challenge we spoke with Craig Drayton, our Client Product Manager.

Craig has been creating successful products for over 15 years and loves helping others to do the same. In this article, he’ll take you through:

Identifying a meaningful problem
Understanding how people are solving that problem
Deciding how your solution could be better and different
Making your app easy to use
Looking beyond your app
Exploring tools and techniques

Identify a meaningful problem

Bringing a new app into the world involves overcoming a great deal of uncertainty. It’s easy to come up with generic ideas about what problem your app may solve, or to have an overly broad sense of who has that problem. However, to validate your app idea, you’ll need to be confident that you’ve identified a real problem that someone has. It’s important to be genuinely willing to challenge your app idea early on and explore the space you’re working in.

The best problem that you can identify is real, felt strongly, and is experienced by a specific person. At the end of the day, it’s going to be people that champion your app, sell it, promote it, or decide to buy it. Understanding what motivates people, what they want to achieve, and what they’re finding difficult will ensure you’re responding to a real problem. And this foundation will help real people to champion, sell, promote and buy your app.

Understand how people are solving that problem

Once you think that you’ve got a really promising problem to work on, you’ll need to understand how people are solving it now. Even if there seem to be no direct competitors today, your potential customers are still satisfying their needs somehow. In fact, a lack of clear competition can actually be a warning sign.

Counterintuitively, if there are competitors that exist out there, that you know people are choosing and using – and even better, paying for – that’s a sign you’ve found a promising problem. Because people are investing their time, effort and money in solving it.

Beyond other apps, explore other approaches and services that people are using to solve the problem. People may even be solving the problem themselves manually.

To validate your app idea, it’s essential to talk to your potential customers. Try and discover all the ways that they’re currently solving that problem.

Decide how your solution could be better and different

Once you feel that you understand how people are solving the problem – how is your solution going to be better? Often, ‘better’ does not cut it. Ideally your solution is meaningfully different to existing solutions.

Blue Ocean Strategy is a great resource that can help you to explore this idea. Authors Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne point out that if you’re trying to bring something new into the world, it’s better to compete in a space that’s your own, than to compete against incumbents who’ve had many years and potentially millions of dollars to develop their offerings.

This is about differentiation. How is your solution going to be positioned in a way that stands out from existing alternatives? To do this, you might focus on one particular segment of the market, or one product aspect that is novel compared to other offerings. Usually that means sacrificing in other areas. You might initially offer 80 percent less than your competitors, because you think that the 20 percent that you’re focussed on is enough to attract sufficient demand.

Make sure your app is attractive and easy to use

If people can’t use your solution, they can’t get any value from it. If they have to work hard to learn and use your app, they’re unlikely to bother. And if your app looks unpolished, people may turn to more professional offerings in the market.

Involving a professional UX designer from the beginning of the process will help you to get to the essence of the idea and create a solution that is intuitive to learn and use, as well as looking great. A polished, professional app helps you to look trustworthy and competent, which is helpful for building early momentum.

Look beyond your app

Can you build a viable business around your app idea? It’s quite possible to make something that people value, that they’re willing to pay for, that they can use, and that you can build. But that isn’t the same as knowing you have a viable business. Maybe the market is not big enough to produce enough revenue. Legal or regulatory constraints may hold you back. The costs of reaching customers may be too high relative to what they’re willing to pay.

There are many reasons that a product might suit customers, but not support a functioning business. The product itself is only one part of bringing a successful business into the world.

Explore tools and techniques to support you

There are many tools and techniques that can support you to validate your app idea – whether you’re researching how potential users solve the problem today, developing a hypothesis on why your solution might be better and different, or testing your assumptions.

Finding the right tool or technique will depend on your solution and the stage you’re at. You might…

interview customers
produce design prototypes
develop technical prototypes
conduct desktop research
develop financial models.

Our team here at Wave can help you to find tools and techniques that are the right fit for you at every stage. If you were to create your app design prototype with us, you’d be collaborating with:

a product manager – to help you ensure that your product is valuable and viable
a UX designer – to ensure users’ interaction with your product is as easy and enjoyable as possible
a technical lead – to ensure we have a feasible solution that can be implemented smoothly.

Many tools and techniques involved in validating an app idea require one or more of these skill sets. In startups and many organisations that we work with – spanning healthcare, government, nonprofits, education, research and corporates – it’s rare to be able to access in-house expertise in these three fields.

Involving Wave early on, so that you’re ready to work through all of the unknowns in building an app, will help you to validate your idea, find the best approach to suit your concept and budget and ultimately succeed.

Looking for tailored advice for your app idea?

We offer free 30 minute consultations to provide you with:

A clear understanding of what your app project would involve, including a realistic expectation of cost/time
Insight into the most important things to consider for your project before you proceed
Recommendations on next steps

We’d love to hear from you.

Book a free 30 minute consult.

About the author

Craig Drayton is the Client Product Manager at Wave Digital. He has spent many years leading and building new digital products, and loves using this experience to help clients avoid common pitfalls and accelerate them down their path to success.