
Resources to help you get savvy with lean market research. Including updates on live test campaigns, case studies, industry news, marketing tools, articles and company updates.
Welcome to 2021 🎉
Good luck this year! If we've learned anything from 2020 it's to expect the plan to change and don't wait. If there's a thing you need to do, go and do it.
We're expecting this to be a big year for Validation.Run. Jonny and I have been working on this in as a side project for 4 years now and we're ready to open up the throttle to make this our main focus. Of course, this depends greatly on you. We're making this for you as much as we're doing it for us.
Validation.run is for founders, entrepreneurs (beginners and advanced), product people, heads of innovation, investors, incubators, accelerators, and basically anyone who wants to measure demand and identify the target audience for their new business idea. It's also for observers. Maybe you're thinking of an idea, mulling it over. That's cool. We're here for you with all the resources you should need to get your idea manifested in reality.
It's a complex process, building a viable new company. We've been validating ourselves over the past few years. Now we know with much higher certainty who our target audience is, what motivates them, what they're trying to get done and how they see their idea fitting into the world.
It's an audacious task, to create something out of nothing. To make your idea manifest out of sheer will and perseverance. We've got your back. We're in this together.
Validation.run is a methodology as much as it is a company. A playbook or sequence of testing that we're also applying to our own internal ideas, our own side projects and the company itself. Very meta, but we've surely tested our own testing platform.
We're looking forward to what we can create together this year, Jonny, myself and all of you. We're always open to what you have to say.
If you need a prompt, here are the classic customer development questions:
What is it you're trying to get done here?
How are we helping you achieve this?
What could we be doing better to help you achieve this
Spoiler alert, this is all you should be asking your audience. Do this 50 times and you'll know more about the problem/solution paradigm than anyone and have gained the perspective to launch something seriously relevant.
Good luck this year! If we've learned anything from 2020 it's to expect the plan to change and don't wait. If there's a thing you need to do, go and do it.
More campaign updates, articles and resources to come!
Cheers,
Michael & Jonny
How to Find a Good Business Idea
Stress testing your idea by discussing it with real target customers is the way.
Solve your own problems
Look to your own problems with life, tasks, work, etc. Observe your own patters of behavior when it comes to tackling these issues in your life. If you can solve your own problems, you can package it to sell to other people like you.
Work within your subject matter expertise
If you go through with starting a new project, you’re going to have to become the expert. A head start will be handy.
Ask your friends and family for biased feedback
Unless they are subject matter experts and/or the target audience, filter their input.
Ask the target audience for unbiased feedback
Identify and locate your ideal customer, in the real world, and online. Ask them open-ended questions about the problem/solution paradigm. Your aim is to get to the core of the problem, as they experience it.
After you speak to 50 people, who fit your ideal customer profile, your perspective on the matter will inevitably change. This will take a moment, but by the time you're through, you should understand the problem in a far more nuanced way, having aggregated the experiences and perceptions of your target audience.
You'll gain the necessary perspective to either put this one aside or begin the epic journey of building a solution.
Stress test the idea to learn if its good or not
Validate. Set up a hypothesis and try to break it. If it survives under duress, you’ll know you’re onto something.
Photo by Bruno Scramgnon from Pexels.
Google Search Rankings - 2020 Update from Backlinko
Google search rankings involve factors that affect where your page sits in the search results (SEO). We don’t know exactly what goes into the algorithm, but we have a pretty good idea based on research done by groups like Backlinko. Here’s their 2020 update.
What are Search Rankings?
Google search rankings are a curious thing. They are the factors that affect where your page sits in the search results. Studying and implementing these is what SEO is all about.
Google doesn’t exactly publish what the rankings are, and it’s likely that the bulk of the actual “ranking and filing” work is mostly automated now. It’s more machine than man at this stage. Nevertheless, we believe there are about 200 ranking factors that go into the mix. Most of these appear to have a relatively low weighting factor in the search algorithm and therefore aren’t of concern to most websites out there.
Google’s Contribution to Search Engines
Google's original top ranking factor, and what allowed them to excel in the search engine business, is backlinks. These are web links back to your site. Search engines used to rank sites primarily based on the amount of traffic they received. Google changed the game by adding the measurement of backlinks into its algorithm. This meant websites that had more “citations”, presumably due to the quality of their content, were given a rankings boost.
Fast forward to today and the algorithm has evolved through many iterations, many minor and some major. It is believed that human moderators are making countless minor tweaks, around the clock. Adding this to the automation aspect, it’s fair to consider the search algorithm to be more of a living ecosystem than a simple mathematical function.
The Top Google Search Ranking Factors
Comprehensive content
Backlinks to your site
The way we in the industry learn about what’s important and what’s not is by running large scale studies to determine from our own data what moves the needle and by how much. Luckily, we have amazing SEO resources like Backlinko, to take on this epic task.
A Summary of Their Key Findings
Our data shows that a site’s overall link authority (as measured by Ahrefs Domain Rating) strongly correlates with higher rankings.
Pages with lots of backlinks rank above pages that don’t have as many backlinks. In fact, the #1 result in Google has an average of 3.8x more backlinks than positions #2-#10.
Comprehensive content with a high “Content Grade” (via Clearscope), significantly outperformed content that didn’t cover a topic in-depth.
We found no correlation between page loading speed (as measured by Alexa) and first page Google rankings.
Getting backlinks from multiple different sites appear to be important for SEO. We found the number of domains linking to a page had a correlation with rankings.
The vast majority of title tags in Google exactly or partially match the keyword that they rank for. However, we found essentially zero correlation between using a keyword in your title tag and higher rankings on the first page.
Page authority (as measured by Ahrefs URL Rating) weakly correlates with rankings.
We discovered that word count was evenly distributed among the top 10 results. The average Google first page result contains 1,447 words.
HTML page size does not have any correlation with rankings. In other words, heavy pages have the same chance to rank as light pages.
We found a very slight correlation between URL length and rankings. Specifically, short URLs tend to have a slight ranking advantage over longer URLs.
Our data shows that use of Schema markup does not correlate with higher rankings.
Websites with above-average “time on site” tend to rank higher in Google. Specifically, increasing time on site by 3 seconds correlates to ranking a single position higher in the search results.
The #1 Reason Startups Fail
Most startups fail due to “no market need”. Meaning not enough people are interested in your idea to begin with. Learn how lean market research can help.
It’s something I have witnessed first hand through my consulting experience, anecdotally by being in the startup ecosystem, and backed up with data from CB Insights (Crunch Base). It makes sense that this the biggest issue because it’s also the most overlooked part of starting a company. Don’t get me wrong, many nail it. But the problem is that the majority of would-be founders are oblivious to the real need for market validation. Testing is the answer.
Most startups fail due to “no market need”. Meaning not enough people are interested in your idea to begin with. See the full breakdown below.
It looks like a paradox at first: the audacity required to start a new company, paired with the humility to check your assumptions along the way. Most people just push their vision forward, without consulting anyone except maybe friends and family. Who although are well-meaning with their encouragement, are probably not subject matter experts in whatever realm their friend is looking to dive headfirst into.
The reality is that you must build your new vision in concert with those who you hope to support - your audience. In business, we’re in the service of our customers. You need to, and should, make a healthy profit. But you won’t even get off to a good start unless you craft your offering to match your intended audience.
Feedback is the way we iterate to greatness. There’s a whole realm of Customer Development, which I equate to the Retention stage of the Pirate Metrics sales funnel. This retention stage might be the most important part of the customer journey because it’s where the dialogue between visionary and consumer takes place. Only together will they both make progress toward a truly viable solution. Win-win is the only way.
Through testing, we're able to validate our assumptions. It’s what one should do at the onset of any new business and during the initial phase of finding product-market fit. Realistically, during this early stage, you need to be spending 50% of your time on distribution efforts (listening to your customer) and 50% on product development (applying their feedback). Only once you find product-market fit can you relax this ratio to focus more on product development. But don’t ever completely cut off the conversation with your customers.
Get Savvy on Testing
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