Discover the essential steps to test, refine, and validate your media business ideas for lasting success
Imagine reaching out to a close friend, relative, or anyone who loves and cares about you and asking them if your media-related business idea is good. The excellent feedback (although Balkan millennials would somewhat disagree) you would receive might put you on a hopeful, resource-consuming path, only to find out that your media-related business idea is not a viable one. You have lost precious time and money to put it forward and remain unsure of the lessons learned from this experience.
Or maybe there is one lesson you can draw: Is it a good idea to ask loved ones if my media-related business idea is good?
The innovation introduced by the Validation Booster Programme helps you answer that question and, most importantly, enables you to ask the right questions to your target audience (either clients or users) so you can test your ideas and generate insights that might confirm you are on the absolute right path, provide insights on how to improve your idea and subsequent implementation or inform them that their idea is not viable or appropriate for the context and time of implementation – at minimal resource consumption – we call such innovation the idea validation process.
The Idea Validation Process constitutes a series of steps that a media-related business idea holder must undertake to generate insights and knowledge that confirm or deny the viability of their idea.
The Idea validation process builds on the previous elements of the Validation Booster programme. It is of the utmost importance that all program participants carefully craft and conduct market research, SWOT analysis, and a thorough business canvas model.
Hypothesis formulation and validation
A very important element of the idea validation process is formulating hypotheses, which are generated to validate assumptions about customer behaviour, market needs, or product/solution composition.
Formulating hypotheses and subsequent testing allows you to gather data and information that helps you validate your idea.
By this step of the validation booster programme, you have already identified a problem or an issue that needs to be addressed. Building on this problem or issue, you formulate your hypothesis, which should consist of the identification of variables, a clear and logical connection/linkage between them, and setting up clear metrics and validation criteria that will allow you to make an informed decision on the validity of your hypothesis.
Let’s assume you are working on a podcast series focused on women in different careers and their achievements. You have done market research, gathered qualitative and quantitative information on gender equality and women’s representation in your area/region, and have some data on how podcasts are performing in your area/region.
To move forward with your idea, you will need to build a series of hypotheses, which will allow you to gather data relevant to determining whether or not your assumptions about your idea, customers/users’ behaviour, or market needs are valid.
However, one single hypothesis cannot help you gather all the relevant information. This is quite intuitive. As a matter of fact, you cannot have only one assumption about your idea.
Along with your hypothesis, it is important to define specific segments of your audience to whom you will be asking questions.
MOM Test
In 2013, Rob Fitzpatrick published a rather interestingly titled book, The mom test – how to talk to customers and learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you (your mom will always say your ideas are the greatest ones). The book emphasises the need to ask the right questions to specific segments of target customers or users to learn about their experience with an issue you are trying to solve.
It requires you to strip yourself of your biases to then be able to guide discussions that allow for qualitative data collection that provides valuable insights into your idea validation research exercise.
Are you asking the right questions?
Three main guidelines stem from the MOM Test:
- Talk about your customers or users’ lives instead of your idea
- Ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future
- Talk less and listen more.
To do so, you must craft questions that help you avoid insufficient data, such as compliments and fluff (generics, hypothetical, and the future), and learn about your customer’s or users’ issues, constraints, and goals.
You can ask these MOM-approved questions when doing questionnaires, focus groups, or in-depth interviews.
What is a MOM test-approved question?
Going back to the podcast example above, you can ask a target customer: Would you listen to a podcast focused on women in different career paths and their achievements? You can also start by asking about their media consumption practices, preferred types of content, interest in gender equality, and so on.
Segmentation
Customer segmentation refers to creating smaller groups (segments of customers) that share common characteristics and traits.
Segmentation, which builds on the different personas built throughout the validation booster program and the customer segments identified in your Business Canvas Model. For each identified segment, you can craft MOM test-approved questions.
One customer segment for your podcast series can be civil society organisations working on gender equality, equality champions from the private sector, or community leaders in areas with higher rates of gender-based violence and discrimination.
Endgame
As you move through the final phase of the idea validation process after you have defined your idea and problem statement, segmented your customers/users, formulated your hypotheses with accompanying metrics, and prepared your questions, you dive into the validation activities for an eleven-week period.
This part of the process is exciting, as you take your media-related business idea outside of your computer and restricted Zoom spaces into the real world and engage with your customers/users to generate insight that will help you model it.
It is also a very important moment to test your agility in adapting your validation activities, adapting your hypothesis to reflect the newly generated knowledge, analysing data as you go, and ultimately creating the bigger picture about the validity of your idea, the changes it needs to go through (and possibly after that a new validation process), or taking the difficult decision of letting your idea go, and get inspired by your findings to create something new.
In this phase of the validation process, you might also develop demo products, such as a couple of podcast episodes, to disseminate and test how audiences perceive them and how your targeted customers see them.
The end of the process requires a final report, where you tell the story of your process and document it.
