How to Know if Your Idea’s the Right One — A Founder’s Guide for Successful Early-Stage Customer Discovery
How do you go from a pie-in-the-sky idea to a fully-fledged product? Some founders start building right away, spinning up a (slightly shoddy) MVP for folks to react to, then iterating from there. Others take a deep-diving approach to research, setting up dozens (or even hundreds) of calls with folks to validate the idea before writing a line of code.
As a user research expert, you might expect Jeanette Mellinger to be in favor of the latter approach — but you’d be wrong.
Sure, she’s a big proponent of user research interviews as a form of validating your idea. But this slapdash mentality of trying to speak to as many folks as possible is where she finds that many well-meaning founders go astray.
In addition to her role as BetterUp’s Head of UXR, Mellinger also works closely with early-stage startup founders as First Round’s User Research Expert in Residence. To these folks, she preaches the mentality that less is more. You can glean more qualitative data points and patterns from five deep conversations than from 50 unfocused ones.
“We get nervous when we hear, ‘Oh gosh, I only spoke with five people.’ But that’s my user research magic number. If you bring that focus into it, you can get something that’s much deeper than you’d ever expect,” she says.
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On the Review, we unpack her ultra-approachable three-step guide to bring more structure to early customer discovery and idea validation.
Before starting any kind of marketing campaign, Hepworth likes to level set by taking it back to basics. Whether it’s building up performance marketing, or considering investing in certain programs like affiliates or SEO, she always asks two questions:
- What’s the time and dollar investment that we are making there?
- What’s the value to the business that’s coming out?
The campaigns that bubble to the top of the list are those most likely to move the needle on Notion’s activation rate. A quick aside here: There are a few different definitions that marketers can use when they talk about activation: 1) People who initially sign-up, 2) people who “activate” into high-quality, engaged users, and 3) a portion of those high-quality users who become paying customers.
Along the way, she shares plenty of low-lift tactics to ensure your approach is rigorous, but not onerous.
- Step 1: Make a Plan. “It’s so tempting to want to ask about 10 things at on