Strategies For Validating Product Concepts With Users

Michael Margolis has been a UX research partner at GV (Google Ventures) for nearly 15 years, and through his hands-on work with over 300 startups has developed a unique approach to helping founders identify their “bullseye customer”—the specific subset of their target market who initially is most likely to adopt their product. In our conversation, Michael shares: 🔸 The step-by-step process of running a bullseye customer sprint 🔸 Practical tips for conducting effective customer interviews 🔸 The most common mistakes founders make when picking their first customers 🔸 The power of “watch parties” in aligning teams around customer insights 🔸 How to apply these methods beyond typical tech startups 🔸 Much more Listen now 👇 - YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gwJ6vMfm - Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gpZgzVfc - Apple: https://lnkd.in/g493bRqG Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast: 🏆 Eppo — Run reliable, impactful experiments: https://www.geteppo.com/ 🏆 Paragon — Ship every SaaS integration your customers want: https://lnkd.in/geirC2qS 🏆 Enterpret — Transform customer feedback into product growth: https://lnkd.in/gjz_mCJt Some key takeaways: 1. Instead of a long, drawn-out research process, you can identify your ideal customer by doing a one-day sprint with your whole team. The process involves five qualitative interviews with your bullseye customers and watching them as a team in real time. This speeds up learning and ensures that the whole team gets aligned around the same insights. 2. The bullseye customer is more specific than a typical ideal customer profile (ICP). It’s an even more narrow subset of your target market most likely to initially adopt your product. Focusing on this narrow group helps you prioritize product development, align teams, and accelerate learning. 3. When validating your ideas, don’t get stuck on perfecting a single prototype. Instead, create at least three different versions to test. This helps you see what resonates most with your bullseye customer and allows your team to avoid getting too attached to one concept. 4. One of the biggest advantages of doing the bullseye sprint is learning how to recognize rejection early. Pay attention to signs of indifference during customer interviews. When you hear, “Oh yeah, I guess that would be nice,” or something similarly noncommittal, that’s your cue to move on. You’re looking for customers who are ready to say, “Take my money—where do I sign up?” 5. The way you approach customer research should differ from sales. Practice humble inquiry—ask questions as if you’re learning, not selling. Be vulnerable and embrace the fact that you don’t know everything. Your goal should be to learn, not to pitch. 6. Before diving into interviews, get everyone to predict what they think they’re going to learn.

Your early users aren't just test subjects—they're co-creators of your product's future. 🌱 This lesson has been top of mind as we navigate PMF, especially now that we’ve hit the three-month mark for our Clarify‎ pilot program. Austin Hay‎ and I spent some time writing up the main lessons learned—both in running pilot programs and for our product space specifically—in our latest blog post. Below is a TL;DR version 👇 First things first: words matter. We chose "pilot program" over "design partner program" for a reason. It reflects to our community, investors, and customers we've built something tangible and ready for real-world testing. 🎯 Secondly: The structure of the program also has to be intentional to ensure you get the most out of it. We broke ours down into four phases: 🧠 Learning: Cast a wide net, talk to everyone. ✅ Validation: Focus on solving real problems. 🚀 Onboarding: Qualify leads, start your sales motion. 💰 Sales-ready: Integrate monetization, prepare to scale. Each phase helped us refine our product and our processes to build a better product for our users. By the end of the program, we were given five core lessons from the experience and all the amazing user feedback. Serious shoutout to everyone who went through the pilot process with us, you’re the best. 🏆 Here are five key takeaways from our pilot program: 🔮 Embrace feedback: Early adopters are visionaries. They don't just tell you how they work now; they imagine how they could work in the future. This input is gold for shaping your product. 🧪 Validate your RATs (Risky Assumption Tests): We all have assumptions about what customers want. Actively seek to validate these. The insights can be surprising and invaluable. 🎯 Qualify, qualify, qualify: It's tempting to onboard anyone who shows interest. Resist that urge. Proper user qualification saves time, energy, and team morale in the long run. ⚡ Deliver value quickly: Users are often more forgiving of rough edges than you'd think, especially if they see the potential value. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. 🔄 Share feedback with your team: User insights aren't just for product development. They create a positive feedback loop that energizes your entire team. Bonus advice for other early-stage companies chasing PMF: Acquiring pilots is only half the battle. Retention is equally crucial. Go slow, qualify correctly, set clear expectations, and build customer care early. Turn your pilots into valuable partners in your product development. 🤝 ❓For those of you on the other side of your pilot program journey: What was the most surprising lesson you learned from your early users? If you’re building out your own pilot program or want to dig in to the CRM-specific learnings ours uncovered, check out our full blog post at the link in the comments 👇

When you're launching something new, you want to be sure it's going to work. Running in-market experiments prior to launch confirms hypotheses before you commit resources. Just as important,  experiments can often prevent big missteps. Here are four rules of thumb that make for powerful experimentation: 1. Test more than one concept or proposition with more than one target market segment. Sure, you can test just one concept with just one target, but you'll only learn if it succeeded or failed. If you test several concepts in parallel with more than one target, you can compare performance by audience and start to understand the drivers of success across concepts. 2. Make sure that tested concepts are distinct and differentiated. Each concept should be unique because the goal is to learn as much as possible. If you only test three shades of blue, you'll never learn that people actually want red. 3. Test more than once. As you see 'hot spots' form between concept and audience, test variations of your winning concept. Let’s say, for example, that you test three distinct versions of your new product concept—let’s call them Red, Yellow, and Blue. In the first experiment, Red tests well with all three of your target audience segments. In the next experiment, test three versions of Red with all three segments. This next experiment might explore value propositions or particular features or positioning. It’s a way to generate additional learning about strategy: →What problem does Red solve for customers? →Which features drive interest in Red? →Which positioning helps to interest people in Red? 4. Be aware of your testing environment and how it creates bias (or not) for your experiment. I prefer real-life in-market experiments, with just enough exposure to generate statistically valid results; others prefer ‘lab-based’ testing. Either way, think about how representative your environment is of your eventual launch. The next time you’re making a big move, remember: experiments are a powerful way to reduce risk, whether you are launching a new product, repositioning a brand, or prioritizing a product pipeline. Happy experimenting! #LIPostingDayJune