You are back! I'm glad to see you again! Go grab a nice cup of coffee, sit back and enjoy these few lines that I hope will make you a billionaire entrepreneur like Elon Musk.

In case you don't understand what I'm talking about, I strongly recommend you to check out the first article of this series, about finding a problem: #1 - Let's find a problem to tackle. Go ahead, we are waiting for you here 🙂

…

Let’s kick-off!

Now that we have our problem, we need to know if it is a real problem. We must know if it is shared by many people, and most important if these people are willing to pay us to provide them with a solution to this issue.

To find out, just ask them! But not only that.

Actually, do you know who you should ask? A millennial? A woman? Your child? Your grandmother? First of all, you have to create your persona!

Let's take a closer look at some tools that might help you to know if your problem is a real one.

Persona

https://www.hubspot.com/make-my-persona

"Persona" is a marketing term that describes your ideal customer. It is important to know precisely your target, his/her consumption habits, what he/she does with his/her free time, etc. All this to establish the best strategy to talk to your persona and push your product or service.

Hubspot has created a tool to help you define your ideal B2B target. In my opinion, this tool is good but not the most appropriate if you want to target a B2C segment. About B2C market, you will have to focus more on their goals and needs, their motivation as well as their frustrations in their daily life.

User interview

While staying focused on your persona, try to find people around you who fit that description and go talk to them.

In order to gather as much information as possible and determine if your problem exist, do not ask them directly if they have this issue in order to not biais their opinion. Have an ordinary conversation with them, be interested in their daily life, their feelings, their problems without orienting the discussion towards your problem. This is called an unstructured interview.

For example, if your issue is: car insurances are poorly managed. Try to conduct your interview about how the person manages his or her life, how he or she deals with problems in general. Don't be frustrated if the person doesn't talk about cars! If they didn't talk about it, it must not be that important to them ;)

However, he or she had to talk about many other things that were more important. Take notes!

Typeform

https://www.typeform.com/

Typeform is a platform that allows you to easily create surveys and distribute them to your audience. The questionnaire can also be integrated to many tools such as Mailchimp, Hubspot, Calendly, Webflow and many others.

As we use Typeform to validate the problem, you have to find the audience you want to send your questionnaire to. This means that you need to identify enough people who fit your persona, or you need to find a way to distribute your survey where your target audience is. That's why the work on your persona must be done in a precise and deep way in order to reach your potential customer easily.

In addition, you need to estimate the minimum number of responses required for your study to be statistically reliable. Here is a link to help you calculate this: https://www.checkmarket.com/sample-size-calculator/

SurveyMonkey

https://www.surveymonkey.com/

SurveyMonkey is perhaps the most useful tool to solve the challenge of reaching your audience. Indeed, it is possible to create a survey, just like Typeform, but you can define to whom SurveyMonkey will send your questionnaire according to many socio-demographic criteria; age, nationality, income level, occupation, etc.

Of course, this solution is not free, the price depends on the number of respondents you want. However, we can question the relevance of the answers you will collect because the participants are paid to answer surveys, therefore the reliability of the answers can be questioned. To counter this; 1. try to have a maximum of answers to have a sufficient statistical probability (see above), 2. your questions must be relevant and not biased so that the respondents are not tempted to answer quickly.

For example, do not ask: "Is paying for your car insurance a hassle?" but rather "How do you feel about paying a car insurance bill?" with a slider allowing respondents to be more nuanced in their response.

So.

Now that you have a lot of answers, you must analyze them and draw conclusions!

How ?

Based on KPIs that you set before and market data!

Examples: you figured out that 18% of your respondents are confronted with your problem every day and that 10% would be willing to pay CHF5 per month. Is that enough? It's up to you 🙂

As of now, there are two possibilities:

1. Your findings do not confirm that your problem exist for your persona. You should then try to find another issue. However, it is possible that during your interviews, people mentioned more intense situations. You just have to try again to confirm this problem. It can be complicated to face potential customers and realize that your project is not viable. However, it is important to learn to pivot in order to avoid wasting time and money!
2. Your findings confirm that your problem is intense enough and you can get started!

And to get started, you will have to set up an action plan to validate your problem a second time; but this time on the market!

This is what we will see in the next article: #3 - Create the solution

‍

Don't forget to follow our account on LinkedIn and to subscribe to our newsletter!

‍

See you soon!