Validate product value

At this stage, you have met the following requirements:

1. You have successfully marketed a series of value props measured by having a predictable flow of prospects coming from early marketing or sales initiatives

2. You have demo’d a proof of concept, or an MCVP that line up to customer problems and the ability to solve them

3. You have commercially sold to early adopters who have agreed to use the product and provide feedback to your team.

The only way to validate that your product is delivering value is to measure and monitor first hand how customers are using your product, and whether the product is helping the customer in a predictable way. What you are trying to establish is:

1. That your product is helping the customer in the way they imagined, and that it lines up to how it was marketed and sold. It is entirely possible in the early stages that customers see new use cases for your product and begin to deploy or use it differently than imagined. They are still extracting value just not what was marketed and sold.

2. That your product is helping the customer in the way they imagined, and the customer believes that the value being extracted is what was expected if not better. Here, you are trying to ensure that the problem or opportunity your product solves for is in fact still worth paying for. There are times customers see that in fact while the problem they faced is now being solved, its just not worth the expense of solving it.

3. There are emerging patterns in the group of early adopters about how they use the product and the delivery of results. It may be that you have several early adopters and they are all using the product to solve different problems. This is an opportunity to feed this information back into your marketing messages to potentially identify other groups or use cases to sell into.

The method for validation is simple at this stage. Meet with your customers and ask them questions that give you insight into the above. Perhaps the most important aspect to all of this, is that your early adopters will continue paying for and using your product.