via https://www.bigcommerce.com/blog/evaluate-product-market-viability/#undefined

Market research

  • SWOT analysis

  • Overall market trends (Use Statista to determine: Is it shrinking, stable or growing? What are the new trends? Who are the biggest players?)

  • Niche market trends and demand (Google Trends, Jungle Scout)

Competitive market analysis

Goals: Learn what works, improve on what doesn’t work, and find optimization opportunities.

  • Identify your competition. Who are the established players in your niche? Who are the most promising newcomers? What are their best-sellers?

  • Examine your competitors’ websites. Pay attention to their homepages, product listings, product images, product descriptions and copy among other things. Make notes of “their way” of doing online business.

  • Analyze the competitors’ sales funnels. Understand how others connect with customers at different stages of their customer journey.

  • Break down their marketing strategy. Check out their social media profile. Use Adbeat to learn more about their paid advertising strategy and Ahrefs to figure out their SEO strategy.

  • Reverse-engineer their business model. Are they dropshipping or are they carrying inventory? One easy way to identify dropshippers is by running a reverse image search with their product images since these can lead you to the product page on AliExpress. And if they are carrying inventory, you want to know everything you can about how they handle sourcing, product development, warehousing, etc. These details might take some effort to uncover, but they can help you determine which business model may work better for you.

Determine target audience

Create personas with demographics and psychographics. Pay attention to:

  • Attitude towards the problem that your product solves. Is the problem bothersome enough to warrant paying for a new solution?

  • Financial situation. Are they willing to spend as much as your product costs to remedy the said problem?

  • Purchase history. Do they have a track record of buying similar products in the past?

Figure out winning product criteria

  • Consider product weight and size

  • Consider product fragility

  • Determine your product pricing

  • Understand your options for markup

  • Consider the amount of SKUs

  • Keep seasonality in mind

  • Consider product lifespan

 

via https://fastspring.com/blog/determine-viability-product-idea/

  1. Determine Your Target Customer

    1. Market research

    2. Customer proto-personas

    3. Actual personas

  2.  Understanding the Needs of Your Customers

    1. Map current CX

    2. Identify pp’s and opps

  3. Define Your Value Proposition

    1. pick a clear set of pain points to address. How will your product do a better job at meeting these needs compared to the competition? What unique features do you offer in order to add more value and delight customers? Why should your customers pick your products over others?

  4. Offer Up a Core Set of Features For Your Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

  5. Build the MVP Prototype

  6. Get Your MVP In front of Customers

  7. Reflections, Pivots, & Iterations

 

via https://www.altexsoft.com/blog/business/minimum-viable-product-types-methods-and-building-stages/

  • Evaluate the MVP creation process (how did they gather requirements? Did they do any generative and/or market research? How much time and money have they already invested? Have they validated the feature set?)

  • Evaluate awareness and adoption (social? marketing? pre-sales? ad campaigns?)

  • Evaluate feedback loop/customer 360 (how are they sourcing customer feedback and tracking behaviors and sentiment? how does that intel then feed back into the product pipeline? what’s the organizational process to receive, interpret, and use this info? how many people touch it or contribute to it?)

  1. Define a problem you want to solve

  2. Define the target audience and narrow it down

    1. Existing customer journey

    2. Validated personas

    3. Future state journey

  3. Evaluate your competitors

    1. Define your competitors and the added value they provide

    2. Find their market share.

    3. Use primary and secondary sources of information

    4. Dig deeper (ethno research, use product, network)

      1. Use analytical software (Similar Web, Ahrefs, Quantcast, App Annie, or AppFollow gather data about websites and apps. With them, you can find the rank of your competitor’s app or a website, its monthly traffic, audience interests, geographical locations of customers, and see related products.

    5. SWOT analysis

    6. Define the user flow

    7. Create a list of features and arrange them according to their priority

      1. Story mapping is a two-dimensional approach to managing user stories. It allows for concentrating on parts of functionality and, at the same time, not losing the big picture of a product.

    8. Define the scope of MVP (categorize features under the headings must-have, nice-to-have, and won’t have)

    9. Choose the best-fit management method and engineer an MVP

      1. Lean

      2. Scrum

      3. Kanban

      4. Extreme programming

    10. Apply Alpha and Beta testing

      1. Alpha is a so-called in-house test: A limited group of people, mainly friends and family members, evaluate a product. If a product has passed this test, you can proceed to a beta test and let the real users try a product for one to two weeks.

      2. Build/test/learn cycles for every iteration of product, or even feature