What is Market Validation in SaaS?

Instead of conducting general market research, market validation involves directly testing your proposed product with potential customers. It involves asking the people who would be most likely to buy your product (perhaps they bought similar products in the past) and asking them if they want or need it. 

The purpose is to evaluate potential product-market fit. This decreases the chance of failure after launch, which would be much more costly.

Solicit feedback from potential customers in order to develop a successful product. You’re evaluating the potential demand for your product before committing to the lengthy and costly process of developing the full software. 

Market validating your product is more likely to appeal to potential investors, if your SaaS business seeks funding. Market validation: 

• Avoids wasting resources: adopt or reject ideas based on market validation.
• Makes your product more likely to succeed: develop the SaaS product based on customer feedback.
• Offers a learning experience: learn about what customers need and what they can pay for your product.

Market research is more general and involves identifying industry trends and patterns within a given economic market. In contrast, market validation is more focused on surveying and testing specific sectors of the market, containing customers who might be potential buyers of your product or supporters of your product idea.

Validating product-market fit involves making sure that your product can genuinely solve a problem for your potential audience. The process involves these steps: 

1. Choose your ideal customer: think of exactly who would be likely to buy your product based on previous buying habits, unaddressed needs, demographics, and other factors. 
2. Identify what motivates them: find the solutions that your product can provide to address these struggles.  
3. Offer your product to help: show how your product solves their problems and then confirm whether the solution works for your audience. 
4. Gain insights based on feedback: work out whether your solution was successful based on patterns in the data, collect adjustments you could make, and confirm your typical user would be willing to pay for your software (and how much).
5. Change and improve your product: improve your product based on feedback from customers; this ensures it will better suit your target market.

Two types of market validation methodology are: 

• Surveys and Interviews: simply ask your users what they think of your product via a questionnaire or structured/unstructured interview. 

• Minimum Viable Product (MVP): target early adopters with an MVP or basic prototype of your software and find out what these users think.