Some people can spend years polishing their idea without ever starting to implement it. Others, on the contrary, spend a crazy budget on development and promotion without even properly figuring out whether there's a market for the product. Neither path is likely to be successful, so if you already have an app idea, we recommend that you choose the golden mean: test whether the market wants your idea. Your time and money are extremely valuable to you—you can't afford to waste them by investing in producing a product or service that isn't successful in the market.

The more you test your product before producing and selling it, the better your chances of achieving the sales and profits you want. Just remember that every dollar you spend on market testing will save you many dollars in losses later in the marketing process.

Testing your business idea is your key to success. Don't rush into development. We know it can be a tough task when everything is buzzing and you can't wait to show the world something it hasn't seen before. Unfortunately, statistics show that 80% of startups don't make it to 2 years, and 60% of all product businesses fail because society doesn't want the product.

Studying the viability of your idea will help you either way: you'll either realize that the product will be in high demand and start developing it without delay, or users won't be interested in the idea and you'll save years of time and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Either way—you win.

A plan to help assess the market appeal of an idea:

Marketing analysis of competitors

This will help us learn from the inside whether users are demanding competitors' products, as we suspect. That way, we'll get information about their achievements, failures, and best campaigns.

Functional analysis of competitors

Evaluating the functionality of competitors' products. This will help determine whether killer features we're planning to create are already available somewhere. Next, we need to check whether users actually need these features. The success of your future app depends on it.

Technical specifications

Use analytics to prepare a specification describing all the landing page use cases: how a user interacts with the landing page, what the main and alternative flows are, what errors a user might encounter, and so on.

Design

Once the requirements and structure of the landing page have been defined, we move on to the design stage. Stakeholders share their vision for the design, and the designer prepares a landing page concept. After a couple of rounds of feedback, the design is ready to hand over to the development team.

Development and launch

When testing a business idea, the goal is to minimize development to save budget and reduce the time required. So the frontend and backend are prepared exclusively for the landing page. It's very fast and convenient. This way, the website can provide users with the product information they need.

User survey

Include everything you need to know about the future product at the first stage: functionality, platform, and cost. The fewer questions in the survey, the more people will complete it. To motivate users to take the survey, you could offer something like early access to the product, free use after launch, and so on.

Market research

When it comes to marketing, start by identifying the target audience, customer profiles, and their problems. Once that's ready, move on to ad campaigns—identifying the right audiences and running split tests with our survey on the website. Of course, you'll need a budget for this, but it will be incomparably smaller than the cost of developing a product nobody cares about.

These few stages will be crucial for your product. Be patient, because if the idea really sells, this first step will be a step toward a great future. By the way, this method of testing a product's marketability isn't just suitable for new ideas, but also for MVPs and even existing products that haven't yet taken off and succeeded.