Loading...
Answers
MenuHow do I do the right Market Research for a Product or App?
We have an idea to do a Social "Stress" app, where people can sign up as strangers and meet someone in their same "stressed" mode, like I was fired by my boss today and I find someone who did as well, and we are both Chatting about it. It'll also bring up some comedy for both of us and will be a "social stress reliever". Now obviously the idea is very 'wild', how do I "Test the waters" to see if this could be of an interest to users?
Answers
The best way to do validation on this idea would be to acquire customers through Facebook ads (rich targeting makes you able to cohort users nicely). Then, you could manually pair people via email or through a simple text messaging exchange facilitated by Twilio. In this scenario, you could prompt them to take the actions you think will be at the core of your app's functionality. Observing their engagement rate and what they do with each other would give you some insight into how viable this is.
Happy to talk this through in a call with you. I've helped a lot of clarity members through similar customer development exercises.
Testing your idea thanks to Facebook Ads might be great but I believe there is a better way. In my opinion idea extraction can be done completely for free and you can even get much better results from your research. Here it is what you need to do:
1. You to need to find a way to reach to your niche: through social media (think Facebook, LinkedIn groups, Twitter, etc.) and forums.
2. You connect with individuals directly and ask them about their biggest challenges and issues related to the problem you're solving. You try to find the pain point and then you present the possible solution. You ask about their honest opinion and you will be amazed by what kind of ideas they can give to you.
I can reveal to the whole method to idea validation/extraction that you can use to see if this is the right thing to develop and how you might shift it. Feel free to schedule a call with me if you're interested to learn more.
Here's what I always advise the start-ups that I mentor. Define your system on paper and run it manually in the real world with people that experience the problem you're hoping to solve.
To clarify what that would mean in your case, or how I would run it, would be the following way.
Either in my own offline or online social network (really doesn't matter which network you tap into) I would ask if anyone was fired today, or has recently had a major social stress situation. I'd then ask them to inbox me to say I have a "solution" for them. I would then wait for 2 people to contact me and then pair them up and run the "situation" in the way I had intended.
If you find that this whole thing falls flat on its face, you then have a good idea of how hard it will be to get people to "buy in" to your idea. If you find people approach you, then you know there is some merit.
Ultimately, it all comes down to doing all the "thinking" upfront and then applying it in the real world in a manual fashion. That's your validation.
Feel free to call me if you want me to talk you through it in an exact step by step fashion.
Market research is developing an extensive understanding of the customer. The insights help in developing innovative marketing strategies. As an app development company or app-entrepreneur, you may want to know the best ways to conduct market research. You might want to start by determining how you will position your brand in the market. To market your app, start with defining your target audience. The research findings will help you attain that edge by building innovative features into your app, integrating usability aspects, and remaining relevant and original. You can strengthen your app’s core when you conduct a SWOT analysis. A business plan is a roadmap and includes aspects like sales, revenue, market, and profit. You will get more confident and get a better understanding of the market as you explore the various facets of market research. Next, let us look at some effective marketing strategies that are important for mobile app success. App stores are one of the first touchpoints for potential customers to discover your app. You could find influencers on LinkedIn, Buzzsumo, and Crunchbase. Collaborating with influencers can be mutually beneficial and help to promote your mobile app. Offering potential customers a benefit when they endorse your app online is a definite way to gain word-of-mouth for your mobile app. You might track them through metrics, including churn rate, session length, time in-app, daily active users, and cost per acquisition. These key metrics will bring in exciting insights on what worked well and what did not. A blend of the old-and-new will get you some hard-hitting market strategies for your mobile app.
Besides if you do have any questions give me a call: https://clarity.fm/joy-brotonath
Related Questions
-
How can I become an idea person, as a professional title?
One word: Royalties This means you generate the idea and develop it enough to look interesting to a larger company who would be willing to pay you a royalty for your idea. This happens all the time. Rock stars, authors and scientists routinely license their creative ideas to other companies who pay them a royalty. Anyone can do it. Your business, therefore, would be a think tank. You (and your team, if you have one) would consider the world's problems, see what kinds of companies are trying to solve those problems, and then develop compelling solutions that they can license from you. You have to be able to sell your idea and develop a nice presentation, a little market research and an understanding of basic trademark and patent law. The nice thing about doing this is that if you develop enough cool ideas you will have royalties coming in from a lot of different sources, this creates a stable, passive revenue stream that requires little or no work to maintain. Start in your spare time and plan on the process taking 3-5 years. Set a goal to have a few products in the market that provide enough revenue (royalties) to cover your basic living expenses. Then you can quit your day job and dedicate more time and increase the momentum. A good idea business should have dozens, if not hundreds of license contracts generating royalties. It's possible to pull this off. And it is a fun job (I'm speaking from experience).MM
-
What is the best technology for developing a new mobile app from scratch?
There are two sides to that question. One is the mobile app itself and the other is the backend. If I misunderstood in any way and you didn't mean "native" app I apologize in advance. On the backend, there is no clear cut answer to which is the "best". It depends solely on the developers you are able to get. We for example use Node.js , mongoDB, redis, elasticsearch and a couple of proprietary tools in the backend. But you have your pick of the litter now both on the backend api and the datastore with the myriad of options available and touted as the "best" currently on the market. Now on the app side again it solely depends on what you need your mobile app to do. Experiencing first-hand "develop once, run anywhere" I can say it's more like "develop once, debug everywhere" to quote a Java saying. We have tried Phonegap and Titanium Appcelerator and we have switched to native (ObjC and Java) after a couple of months of trying to go the hybrid route. The reasons behind the choice are as follows: - anything that breaks the pattern of how those frameworks NEED to operate is just a huge technical debt that keeps accruing a huge interest. - anything that uses css3 accelerated animations on Android is buggy at best and slow as hell at worst on any lower (< 4.1 I think) versions of Android I hope this gives you some insight. If you need/want to ask me anything feel free to contact me. MihaiMP
-
What is the generally agreed upon "good" DAU/MAU for mobile apps?
You are right that the range is wide. You need to figure what are good values to have for your category. Also, you can focus on the trend (is your DAU/MAU increasing vs decreasing after you make changes) even if benchmarking is tough. Unless your app is adding a huge number of users every day (which can skew DAU/MAU), you can trust the ratio as a good indication of how engaged your users are. For games, DAU/MAU of ~20-30% is considered to be pretty good. For social apps, like a messenger app, a successful one would have a DAU/MAU closer to 50%. In general most apps struggle to get to DAU/MAU of 20% or more. Make sure you have the right definition of who is an active user for your app, and get a good sense of what % of users are actually using your app every day. Happy to discuss what is a good benchmark for your specific app depending on what it does.SG
-
how to start earning on clarity.fm
Most of the earnings come from the people you are in contact with. The platform is not that big at the moment but it can be earned. My recommendation is to create content on your private page web, facebook, instagram ... and leave a clarity link through your work. If you need extra help call me for 15 minutes.DB
-
What is the average series A funding round at pre revenue valuation for a enterprise start up w/cutting edge tech on verge of our first client.
With all respect to Dan, I'm not seeing anything like that. You said "pre-revenue." If it's pre-revenue and enterprise, you don't have anything proven yet. You would have to have an insanely interesting story with a group of founders and execs on board with ridiculous competitive advantage built in. I have seen a few of those companies. It's more like $3m-$5m pre. Now, post-revenue is different. I've seen enterprise plays with $500k-$1m revenue/yr, still very early (because in the enterprise space that's not a lot of customers yet), getting $8m-$15m post in an A-round. I do agree there's no "average." Finally, you will hit the Series A Crunch issue, which is that for every company like yours with "cutting edge tech" as-yet-unproven, there's 10 which also have cutting edge tech except they have customers, revenue, etc.. So in this case, it's not a matter of valuation, but a matter of getting funded at all!JC
the startups.com platform
Copyright © 2025 Startups.com. All rights reserved.