Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / A Masterclass in Product Validation

Transcript

A Masterclass in Product Validation · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:10
  Hello, hello. Welcome back. Look at you, beautiful in hot pink. Aw, thanks. I'm wearing my Your Hype Girl and Co-host jumper, which I get compliments on all the time. Do you? And people wonder if it's available. Oh my God, I love that. I have people constantly asking me about
• 0:31
  merch too and i'm constant like it happened yesterday and i was like i don't know we don't sell merch i just get it made when i need to get it made for the people who need to wear it we need to sort out merch i need to bring that back to my like priority list i feel like especially when we switch over to shopify and do the whole like tiktok shop thing which is like any day now i should figure out the merch piece of the puzzle
• 0:57
  Absolutely, because Melody's, I saw, is wearing a lot of it as well, and it looks so good in the videos. Doesn't it? Yeah. And when she went to New York, she wore it in all of her content for, like, she was at the TikTok Met Gala event, and so she wore it on, like, all of her vlogs during the day and, like, filmed a bunch of content of her, like, kind of going to New York in her, like, big hoodie, and I was like...
• 1:20
  I love this. I love it. It's such a statement piece and the color is just boom. I love it.
• 1:27
  Oh, yeah. When I see it on you, I'm like, damn, I love that. I want it. And then I'm like, I have that. Who made that? Who thought of this? It's such a good colour. I feel like this is a moment I should just shout out the woman who does the merch for me. Oh, yeah. Her name is Zoe from Double Trouble. I think the website's, let me just have a quick look. I think it's Double Trouble Gang in the UK. We'll link it in the show notes as well. Yes, it's doubletroublegang.com and she has, I don't know, like so many cool things like hats and stuff as well.
• 1:57
  Anyway, what are we talking about today? Let's get into it. Let's get into it. Today we're going to be talking about product validation. And I'm so excited about this episode because we posted a tweet a little while ago. It was a repost of something that Kate Borgoyne posted on Twitter. And she's just brilliant. She's a serial entrepreneur and she's in the marketing tech world.
• 2:22
  hospitality space. And she's just very active on Twitter and always makes a lot of brilliant points that we get a lot of and our community gets a lot out of as well. Love that for us. Love that. Love that, Kate. Thank you. She posted a tweet which said, it sucks when you've got a new product idea and your customer research proves that your assumptions were wrong and no one really wants your product. It sucks way more when you don't actually do any research and you spend months or years building the wrong thing.
• 2:52
  powerful it's such a hard truth and it's so powerful and it's something that I think a lot of us are kind of consciously blind to you get an idea in your head and you have this vision and you just want to go go go and do this thing and
• 3:11
  There are so many steps before that when it comes to validating your products and making sure there's actually a market out there of enough people that want this thing for it to be viable. And I think we can kind of self-sabotage in this realm. I definitely know that I can do that.
• 3:26
  I mean, I am nodding my head for anyone who, I mean, you're obviously not watching because this isn't a video episode, but like what's so crazy to me, everything that you're saying, I'm like not pro the dropshipping, you know, phenomenon, but what we have to give dropshippers credit for is they, from day one, are like testing products to find out what's actually going to work and what they can scale through ads. And it's like,
• 3:55
  they validate first before even thinking about brand and identity. And I'm not saying that that's right, and that's definitely not the way that I approach, you know, business and brand. I'm not pro the dropshipping thing. But from the perspective of testing from day one and trying to find enough of validation and enough of a product market fit straight away from kind of ads, I'm,
• 4:19
  I think is really interesting and there's probably a lot that we can learn, especially for people who, and myself included, we can be quite romantic about the brand element and like the building of the brand and the idea and like what you're saying, kind of like going too far down that line and spending potentially years, tens of thousands of dollars, but having not spoken to enough people about what that is and whether they will buy it and what the problem is that you're solving. Mm-hmm.
• 4:47
  Yeah, we can lean into those kind of fun, sexy parts of the business that maybe we like, like the branding or building this lovely romantic idea and forget that first part, which is, you know, before you invest all of that time and money and resources and manufacturing, you need to make sure that there's a demand for what you're offering.
• 5:10
  And even though it's impossible to get that 100% right, there's always going to be changes and things that you don't know. I think that process does significantly increase your chances when you get to that point.
• 5:27
  For anyone listening and being like, I've already spent two years and tens of thousands of dollars developing this and I absolutely need to make this work. That is still perfectly fine to start research and iteration from this point. Like you can always tap into customer feedback and like learning and listening and slowly iterating. It doesn't mean you scrap everything and start again or like it's not going to work. It just means like, okay, cool. Like we're going to start doing this from now.
• 5:54
  And that is like a process that as founders, especially like I'm guilty of this all the time. I'm super romantic about my business and my brand. And I can be quite attached to, you know, things that really aren't big picture what matters, but like it matters to me. And that's just like human nature. What matters to you is something that's different for everyone. But I think like.
• 6:16
  And we all, no matter what point of the journey you're in in business, you can start listening and getting like customer feedback and validation constantly. And it should just be a cycle that you build into your, you know, system or your business rather. And I would like this episode today to be a bit of a masterclass when it comes to that. So people that have maybe missed that step before or people that are still in the ideation phase.
• 6:42
  Something that they can tune into to go, you know, this has everything that I need packed into one episode and gives that last kick up the butt to make sure we're going through that process. And to start that off, could you walk us through maybe three, five examples of some cost effective ways that you can practically validate your product in the early days?
• 7:05
  Yes. So, I mean, the best practical way is go to our e-commerce fundamentals course, because I do a whole lesson in there called the customer and hooks matrix, which maybe we can do as another session another time, because it would take me a while to go through it. But you can kind of like take steps to like...
• 7:25
  go through and get feedback and develop your messaging, which is really important to be able to kind of like then lean into ads, but you can develop your messaging from customer feedback. And it kind of gives you a framework and a format to follow, to gather that data across social email or WhatsApp or whatever it might be like with your friends, if you haven't launched yet, or friends of friends rather. And that's $27. I will shamelessly plug it.
• 7:51
  Go to the website or go to Instagram and Josephine will send it to you. But cost-effective ways, it doesn't have to be really complicated. This could be like as simple as setting yourself a goal of like, hey, I'm going to speak to 10 people or I'm going to speak to 100 people. I mean, if you're really like, I'm going to like go hard, I'm going to speak to 1,000 people, you could also do that. But setting a goal and then being like, cool, how am I going to like house this data? So like, let's just say a spreadsheet, super easy. Okay.
• 8:18
  Great. We're just going to go and ask 10 people who are either, if you haven't launched yet, you're pre-rev, we're going to ask our target customer and we can get into in a second how you find those target customers. Or if you're generating revenue, great. It's like picking up the phone or going into your emails and just like emailing your customers.
• 8:38
  your customers to ask for their feedback on your product. And I mean, another really easy way is social media. So putting polls or questions on your stories. And it's basically just like looking at the different channels that you have access to.
• 8:54
  asking the questions that you need to ask and then consolidating that into a document. So you have like, okay, cool, I have 10 data points here or I have 100 data points here. Like what are the trends? What are the themes? What am I getting told repeatedly? And like how does that then inform my product pipeline moving forward or what I need to do to fix my website or what problems people are facing with my product or my like user experience? And something that we did with Female Startup Club early on
• 9:24
  and we still do it when we develop new products, is we just get on one-to-one calls. So for example, I would send out a survey. That survey would have kind of non-leading questions. It would be more like open questions so that you're not...
• 9:39
  guiding the person answering it to the answer that you want. You want them to be like just sharing so that you can take all of that and then kind of extrapolate the learnings. And so I would do the survey and then at the bottom just be like, cool, pop your email in if you want to chat on a one-to-one call. And then I would do like, I think we set the goal of,
• 9:58
  for one of our rounds of interviews to do 20 one-to-one calls. I just did them on Google Meets, all free. I recorded it. I transcribed it. And then afterwards, I just like went through the transcription. I mean, I took notes at the time and you also are able to pull out quotes and things like that. But
• 10:17
  Then I would go through the transcription and you would just see themes and things stand out that people say over and over and over again. So when you're kind of either validating a product that you haven't launched yet or you're wanting to kind of understand what people do and don't like about your product after, like once they're actually kind of buying from you and they're your early adopters or your kind of...
• 10:39
  you know, top tier customers that buy from you often, keeping track of that feedback and then being like, oh, okay, great. And then you can also use that validation as social proof on your website, you know, testimonials, or it might be something that you can then put across into social media as, you know, here's the five star reviews that we've gotten or whatever it might be. But I think like...
• 11:00
  When you're validating a product, it doesn't need to be complicated. It can be really simple and it's just a matter of being like, cool, I'm going to email these people, I'm going to text message these people, and I'm going to put some stuff on social media, I'm going to collate the information, and then I'm going to have that and learn from that and kind of use it to inform moving forward.
• 11:22
  And for the people listening who don't necessarily have a community set up yet or don't have that easy, logical place, for example, we have the Instagram community that we can pop on and we can pop a poll on there. But that obviously takes some time to build up. And what just came to mind is we had Hayley Russell on the show a little while ago. She's the founder of Chippin, a pet food company. And what she did in the early, early days before developing her product
• 11:50
  is that she would go to her local park. Her product was dog treats and she would just speak to people in the local park and people approach people there. There's really something to be said. Oh my God, I loved that episode. Yeah, it's so good. And I think...
• 12:05
  There's always going to be a place where your customers are at. Get yourself familiar with that place and just start talking to people, even if you don't have any connection to them yet or any platform, whether necessarily your followers or people that have opted into your messaging. There's always a space to start that conversation and to meet those people where they're at.
• 12:25
  Totally, totally. Sometimes you'll get anecdotal feedback. It might just be like a comment on your Instagram post, or it might be someone just dropping into your DMs, or it might be a conversation. And if you can remember to put that little tiny anecdotal, like...
• 12:40
  thing into this document that you're like keeping track of, it means that you just won't forget it later when you're kind of like reviewing. And you also sparked another example that I just, I know we're kind of like trying to power through this mini masterclass and I've got so many things to say, but another episode that came to mind of someone who did this really well was Katie from Belly Welly.
• 13:01
  And so when she was validating her idea in the beginning, she was spending a lot of time in other people's Facebook groups that were in the general topic of IBS or gut health issues because she wanted to do a lot of kind of customer listening, customer market research. And I know you can also do like pay to do surveys and stuff, but I don't necessarily recommend that, especially if you don't have a lot of budget. I'm like,
• 13:27
  meh, you can just do it yourself, like do more of a like hands-on approach. But, you know, she was going into these groups and she was positioning herself as someone who was, you know, also a sufferer. She had issues herself and asking questions and trying to understand
• 13:43
  how other people were suffering too so that she could inform and validate her product pipeline moving forward. And she did that for everything from the actual product to packaging and all that kind of stuff. She was constantly validating and building her audience through that. And so you could be like, okay, cool. I'm in X industry. What's the list of where those people hang out? So what would the groups be on Facebook called? What am I searching for on Facebook to find a
• 14:14
  or that is suffering from ADHD but doesn't want to take medication, or is suffering from...
• 14:21
  skin issues like acne or something, and they need a specific type of solution. Like where are they hanging out? So yes, there are the Facebook groups. What would they be called? Maybe there's Reddit subreddits. Maybe there are people in your like nine to five jobs, like Slack channel that also have kind of like communities, or maybe there are just groups at your work that kind of gather and talk about certain things that you could ask feedback from them. Then there are just like
• 14:51
  You could be like, hey, do you know anyone who is suffering from this? Because I'd really like to get some insight from them and get connected to someone who's outside of your friendship circle. Because, of course, your friendship circle is always going to be like, you're amazing. We love you. This is the best thing in the whole world. And you want to get outside of your best friends who are your cheerleaders and talk to other people who actually are, you know, suffering from the problem that you're trying to solve.
• 15:17
  Exactly. And through that kind of coming at something from a place of genuine curiosity is I think always going to bring you the best results. I think a big block in this whole process is that people don't really like asking people for things. I have this at least, or I'd feel guilty then kind of forcing people to do a survey or almost like, oh, sorry, sorry to bother you. That is so British. You stop it. It's so English. It's so bad. It's horrible. Horrible.
• 15:47
  approach it from a place of genuine curiosity, A and B, to genuinely help people, you're jumping into this group of people that need a solution for a certain thing. And you're there to provide that solution and to genuinely talk back and forth about the problem. Then that's such a good reframe to position yourself as a peer in that network and also as someone that can help them moving forward and a way to get some really good feedback on what people actually need.
• 16:15
  Totally. And the thing is, it gets easier asking people for shit the longer you're in business. I used to also be like, oh, I don't want to ask. I don't want to get rejected, whatever it is. But actually, you flex that muscle and you get so many reps in that you're like, oh.
• 16:31
  I don't care. I'll still ask. That's part of being an entrepreneur is asking the questions, getting told no, and then figuring out what you do with that no. But what I will say, and what is so important about if you are in the idea phase of building a business or in the development phase of building a business, you're in such a good position because the more people that you ask, if you have a list of 100 or if you have a list of 1,000 people,
• 16:56
  Those people are starting the journey with you so early. Those people are going to become your first 1,000 organic true fans. They are going to be your first brand-obsessed repeat buyers who are like early adopters for what you're doing because they have been on the journey. You're solving the problem knowing directly what
• 17:17
  what they need. You know, you've got that direct insight. And so the more you do it, especially in that early phase, it's just like puts you in such a great position for the day that you launch. Because imagine you've been speaking to 100 people and then you've got them in a WhatsApp group or you've got them in a Facebook group and you've been sharing your exciting updates or even just on an email list, whatever it is, you've been sharing your updates and asking for feedback. And you've developed this amazing solution that's
• 17:43
  for them. And then it's here, they're going to be like, okay, well, oh my God, I've been watching you do this for a year. I can't wait to buy from you. Like it's, it's so special to take someone on that journey with you. So again, like what you were saying, it's a reframe and get really comfy with asking the questions because it's just going to be so exciting that you're then providing this insane amount of value to someone and you're solving a problem that
• 18:08
  you know, that matters. They need to have that solution. Absolutely. And another episode actually comes to mind as you were speaking then, the Maria Wellness episode with Monica Groney. And we speak about this episode a lot because it's just brilliant. And it's so full of so many tidbits. And she essentially created a PMS supplement.
• 18:29
  And because she was suffering heavily from PMS symptoms. And what she did in the early days is she held her own kind of ad hoc product trials. So she would collect together the supplements that she had researched and she'd worked through with a scientist that she thought would make a huge difference to people's cycle health.
• 18:50
  and reduce their PMDD symptoms and PMS symptoms. And then she started just trialing with a group of people who she'd spoken to and who she knew were suffering and building this relationship with them and seeing how that evolved with them over time. Everyone completely knowing
• 19:07
  you know, what they're in for and what they're doing on both sides. And like you're saying, that group of people, when you help them become your early adopters and really your like mass cheerleaders for whatever you go on to build next, because they've been so heavily involved in that process. And I just loved...
• 19:23
  You know, her taking that process so into her own hands and even though what she needed didn't exist yet and was a bit more technical, she still just created the space for that to be tested in this way. Totally. And you raise another really good point on that episode is like...
• 19:41
  Also, if you're solving a problem that you yourself face, like I wouldn't ever get so overwhelmed in like, oh, my God, I need to speak to a thousand people. Like sometimes like you inherently know what the problem is because you are suffering from that problem and you need a solution and you're not able to find one. And so Maria's Maria Wellness from Monica Groney's episode is.
• 20:03
  like a great example of she was a sufferer, like she had this problem that she needed to solve for herself. And I especially think this when we are like as women and we're dealing with these kind of problems that we usually speak to our girlfriends about, or like it's in the group chat or whatever, like you anecdotally already know that your girlfriends are suffering potentially from the same thing as you. Like if you have, you know, whatever, whatever it might be, like oftentimes you'll know like the people in your friendship group who suffer the same thing. So
• 20:33
  drawn out, months long campaign to like prove or disprove your theory, like you might just inherently know. And yes, you validate it with a group of 10 people at a cute dinner party or small beta group or WhatsApp group or whatever. And that can just be in parallel, ongoing gathering kind of further feedback and insight and interesting conversation that goes into your kind of like documents.
• 21:01
  But it doesn't need to be like this huge thing, especially if you are the person that also has the problem. Like you're solving your own problem. Yeah, it can be fun. I love that. Yeah, totally. Do you have any tips when it comes to differentiating between valuable feedback, especially in a bigger group like this, when you're speaking to a lot of people and noise, things that you maybe shouldn't be taking on board with?
• 21:27
  Oh my God. Like it's, it's really hard. It's hard for you as like a business owner. It's hard for you as a consumer, because like, if you observe like both sides of your, like, if I observe myself as a business owner and myself as a customer, like I probably do this stuff all the time that I'm going to tell you not to do, but like.
• 21:46
  You also, as a consumer, can easily give so much advice and then the business owner on the flip side is receiving so much advice that you're like, you've got to get good at kind of like filtering out, like you say, like the noise and like deciding what you take on and like ignoring the rest. But I think like if you think about...
• 22:03
  Specific feedback kind of would be, like to give an example, a specific piece of feedback could be something like, hey, I was on your website and the checkout process was super weird. It took me a really long time. Like I ended up abandoning my cart like,
• 22:19
  there could be a way to improve that experience. Like I encountered this problem on your website. Like that's very specific feedback versus like noise could be something like, I really just don't like your website. Like it's just not for me. It lacks that kind of like actionable insight and it's, it's vague basically. And so taking like that as an example, it's like how can you build in some kind of feedback loop that,
• 22:47
  Where if you're asking someone, you know, to rate or review or submit feedback, it needs to almost have a prompt to give clear insight, like actionable, practical kind of like feedback versus just like something that's emotional and vague.
• 23:06
  Because when you can get down to the nitty gritty of, but why didn't you like it? Was there a problem that you faced? Or, you know, like what was the hurdle that couldn't get you to check out? That kind of thing. Then you're able to use that specific feedback to iterate and make your website checkout process better. And that's where like feedback is critical. Or you might be like, hey, I just really don't like the packaging of your, you know, of your serums.
• 23:36
  And you're like, but why? And you might not know on that first comment, like that first comment is really vague. And you're like, well, that sucks. I love the packaging. I spent $10,000 developing this bottle. But the person might be like, on that second kind of follow-up, they might be like, oh, well, you know, actually like the way that you've printed on the packaging, like it ends up like shedding off and it goes all over my skin when I'm holding the bottle. And so like, I think there's a problem with the ink. And then you're like, wow.
• 24:03
  whoa, that's so valuable because I don't want to place another order of 10,000 and then my retailers be like, hey, your packaging doesn't work. It needs to be sent back and it's going to cost you more in the long term. Like you need to get to that point of like, what is the specific feedback and why? Versus I just don't like it and I can't tell you why. But because you really want that specific feedback because that's so important. And it's really important to find ways, especially if you're already generating revenue,
• 24:31
  It's really important to find a way to have that feedback loop set up. And so an example of that might be like someone checks out at checkout, there's a pop-up survey that you could plug into Shopify that says like, cool, where did you hear about our product? And then...
• 24:49
  because you'll have your traffic coming from Google Analytics and things like that, but if you're doing specific influencer campaigns, you want to know which influencer drove that so that you then can use that feedback and that data to scale that campaign or do something additionally because that person is driving sales for you. Or it might be like a post-purchase email kind of funnel that you've got set up so it's just happening automatically and gathering data, whether it's like a review or specific feedback or, you know, reporting.
• 25:17
  ranking you and like rating you in some way that you can then filter that back into your product pipeline or your marketing or like optimizing your website or whatever it is. And actually someone who does it really well, just because we spoke about Katie before from Billy Willie, but she, I mean, she's an absolute weapon, but in the early days she would email 50 customers every night and
• 25:40
  at like three in the morning to be like, hey, I just wanted to like check in. I'm the founder. This is my business. I like just want to know what you thought and would ask them a series of specific questions. And, you know, people obviously don't reply, but a lot of people did reply. And the people who would reply every single night, she's just getting data and data and data and insights and insights that is anecdotal and very specific, not just kind of like a checkbox bit of data. And then using that to kind of like implement and iterate moving
• 26:10
  I love that. Yeah, a lot of it comes down to how you ask the question, what kind of wording you use, and you have a lot of power over the data that you end up getting back just based on how you're putting that information out there. And I think a lot of that also comes down to, you know, you touched upon this earlier, not wanting to ask people in your direct circle who are going to be biased in any way, but kind of broaching the subject and understanding.
• 26:38
  approaching people in a way that they're not afraid to hurt your feelings. So I think this came up on the show recently and I can't remember which part you can do that with an anonymous survey. Exactly. Or even just say like, try and hurt my feelings. What's the worst thing about this experience? Just try and hurt my feelings. Yeah.
• 26:55
  Yes. Tell me what you don't like. And like, would you buy it? And then more importantly is, would you buy it a second time? Because you can get someone to buy, but if you can't get them to buy a second time, you've lost. Because I think we even said this last time, like, and I'm going to get it wrong, but it's like, it costs five times more to like acquire every time than it does to like retain. I forget all the retention. I need to like figure out that stat because I seem to say it all the time, but...
• 27:21
  you need to be able to acquire a customer and then make them buy a second time, and a third time, and a third time, and have word of mouth built in and all that kind of stuff because you can't sustainably build a business if you're acquiring every single person and paying that acquisition cost, especially now. Acquisition costs are going up. Meta ads are super expensive. The returns are going down. All that kind of stuff, you need to be able to have a system where that person is going to buy a second time and then you're looking at their lifetime value
• 27:49
  over a longer period of time. Yeah. I love that. Just to round off, do we have any quick tools, resources that can help the product validation process? We touched upon kind of Shopify, a couple of plugins. Is there anything along those lines that people should absolutely be utilizing?
• 28:10
  I mean, I'm just like someone who always tries to use the free option. So I use Google Forms for surveys. I use Google Drive and spreadsheets and stuff like that to collate my data if I'm doing something specific where I'm trying to capture stuff. Obviously, Google Analytics, that plugs into your...
• 28:27
  to your Shopify or whatever system that you're using. Social media, like you can gather data there. These tools are all free. They're like amazing. And keeping track of anecdotal feedback. So screenshotting positive comments. Anytime I get someone who is in my DMs with a positive comment or review or feedback, I just screenshot it and put it into an album on my phone. So again, I just kind of have this stuff being collected in different places.
• 28:53
  So I would say those are just simple, useful tools. And always, especially in the beginning, and if you're bootstrapped, it's like keep it really simple. Don't overcomplicate it. Try and do it for free and do it more of a manual, like one-to-one process versus trying to scale this thing that actually just
• 29:12
  kind of get in and do the elbow, is it elbow grease? Like use your elbow grease to get it done. And then obviously the ultimate validation and like product validation is sales and repeat purchases. Like if you're getting sales and repeat purchases, like your product is validated. That's the sign. From people you don't know, I should say. From people you don't know. When they're strangers. Yeah.
• 29:35
  Yeah, I love that. Thank you so much. This is brilliant. Loved this. Thank you. I'm excited for, I love these episodes. They're so much fun. That's the pod. That's the pod. See you next week. See you next week.
• 29:52
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 30:17
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• 30:39
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