I'm a founder of a SaaS company and can provide some insight that I am surprised is not really written clearly in this thread yet!
There's three types of innovation..
1. What you think people want
2. What they tell you they want
3. What they actually need
Most startups die because their product strategy is #1, the chances your view of the world is going to be adopted by people with many different circumstances is very low. The few think, lets go talk to people, but then die due to misdirection.. customers aren't PM's, they dont know how to solve problems but they know what their problems are.
so you must figure out what do people actually need..
You have two ways (well technically 3) to validate your idea
1. Quantitative
2. Qualitative
3. Resegment an existing market (questionable if you can skip traditional validation but your chances are better here than 1 or 2 above)
If you have funding, you can do quantitative. Build stuff and get it in front of your audience with paid acquisition/marketing.
#2 is the best if you want to be a scientist about things. Learn Jobs to be Done, start conducting interviews, find the problem folks have.. figure out if its a priority and a pattern.. there's lots of good JTBD literature out there, read it all.
#3 - segment an existing category. Take form building for example, you can build a form builder with limited features for a niche audience.. higher ed? (Qualtrics anyone?)
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Hopefully this just scratched the tip of the iceberg for you and gives you some direction!
Just to clarify, qualitative research is less costly per dollar but does cost time. Check out the book "Nail it then scale it".
There's also #4 which is "What I definitely actually need". Tools that you build for other people have a market size of [0, everyone). Tools you build to scratch an itch and actually use have a market size of [1, everyone). That may not seem like a big difference but the scale is exponential, there's as much space between [0, 1) as there is between [1, Infinity).
The next step, and one where people frequently fail, is to introspect and to ask why is it I find PMF with my tool, to what degree are those reasons personal vs universal and what are the minimal tweaks I need to make to expand the adoption of the tool by the next exponential factor? A trivial example would be like, a tool that you build for yourself doesn't need to have authentication but a public tool does. Various things that you hardcoded in because you built a tool that fit you like a glove instead need configurators and other things to fit other people as well.
The most common form of failure with this approach is that people who build their own tools are very high variance from the population so you're likely to build something too niche or too obscure to reach sustainability but that's in many ways a better problem to have than a tool with zero adoption.
There's three types of innovation.. 1. What you think people want 2. What they tell you they want 3. What they actually need
Most startups die because their product strategy is #1, the chances your view of the world is going to be adopted by people with many different circumstances is very low. The few think, lets go talk to people, but then die due to misdirection.. customers aren't PM's, they dont know how to solve problems but they know what their problems are.
so you must figure out what do people actually need..
You have two ways (well technically 3) to validate your idea 1. Quantitative 2. Qualitative 3. Resegment an existing market (questionable if you can skip traditional validation but your chances are better here than 1 or 2 above)
If you have funding, you can do quantitative. Build stuff and get it in front of your audience with paid acquisition/marketing.
#2 is the best if you want to be a scientist about things. Learn Jobs to be Done, start conducting interviews, find the problem folks have.. figure out if its a priority and a pattern.. there's lots of good JTBD literature out there, read it all.
#3 - segment an existing category. Take form building for example, you can build a form builder with limited features for a niche audience.. higher ed? (Qualtrics anyone?)
--
Hopefully this just scratched the tip of the iceberg for you and gives you some direction!
Just to clarify, qualitative research is less costly per dollar but does cost time. Check out the book "Nail it then scale it".