So you noticed something –  something that was missing, or a problem people have that needs to be solved, or an idea whose time just seems to have come. It didn’t quite take over your mind but it didn’t quite leave you either.

You went about your life doing things you normally do. Then days and perhaps weeks after it surfaced into your consciousness, suddenly one day without warning, inspiration struck and you figured out a solution for it – “What if I…”.

A frenzy followed that. You studied the market and competition, you did the numbers, you tried to get into the user’s head and stay there. You figured a way it would work. Innumerable sketches, ideas on design,  ideas on marketing, sleepless nights filled with energy and you got it to the point where you had a basic product in your head, a decent idea of the competition and market, and probably some flowcharts, sketches and/or wireframes.

You have a rough idea of who you are going to target, you have a some idea on how you are going to market it, you <fill in consideration> – You are excited! You believe this will work.  You believe this is a fantastic opportunity given your timing. You believe this will be big.

You believe?

“Damn! I actually don’t know if this will work!”

<Shroedinger cat illustration – “Observe already!”>

If have a passing interest in physics or have ever been a fan of big Bang theory, you’ve probably heard of Shroedinger’s cat. A new business idea at inception is just like that. It is simultaneously alive and dead until you establish some market proof. You can possibly draw a gazillion paths to success at the very beginning. On the flip side only 1 in 10 startups will see any success. Some industries and geographies have a higher success rate  and some much lower. A 1 in 10 success rate is about average. Of the 9 of 10 that fail, 8 fail because of cashflow issues.

So before you bet your money, the next couple of years and what will seem like endless days and nights; before you test your sanity and fill every corner of your mind with the effort this will take, you need to validate at least a few of your most critical assumptions. It seems important. It seems necessary. You’d be right on both counts.

While your experience of coming up with the idea for your product or service may not be exactly what I described above, the next step, which is market testing your idea is not just good practice, it is indispensable. You will need the data from this not just to better understand the challenges your product will face, but also to make critical product and growth decisions, build support for the product, establish social proof, raise funding and establish processes needed to continuously improve the product and offering.

Without this, you may end up building a product nobody uses, or worse, one you lose faith in. I’ve seen of other founders go through this and also have myself – an incredibly painful experience. Unfortunately, this happens more commonly with startups than I’d like to believe, and in most cases, the founders do begin with a strong vision. But a vision needs data to survive.

But first, let’s cover what this article is not. This series of posts is not intended to explain how to put a comprehensive data-driven product management framework in place for your startup. Neither does it show you how to maintain a roadmap aligned with the trajectory of growth you are pursuing for your product.

So what is this post about?

My goal here is to help you distill your thoughts in getting your product off the ground, informed of the opportunities and risk, and most importantly in a way that creates usable data on which you can base your decisions.

In other words, my goal is not comprehensiveness as much as it is efficiency.

Most of my experience comes from building software products and services, so there is bound to be a bias in the methods outlined here towards those kinds of products. But you should be able to apply these to any industry (as you will see in the case used here). This article draws heavily from “The Learn Startup” model as much as it does from industry cases and my experiences.

Feedback on how I can make this guide more relevant/useful would of course be very appreciated. <I have also included a list of excellent resources at the end of this post under “Additional Resources” which I strongly recommend you check out.>

In order to

Aria’s Guitar

Aria works in a mobile device manufacturing company. She loves music(especially jazz) and has been playing the guitar since she was 12. One of her hobbies is building electric guitars from scratch, which she does for herself and her friends. While she has never built and sold electric guitars professionally, she had acquired a strong body of knowledge on how electric guitars work and how to build them to unlock different tonal attributes for different genres of music.

One day while working on her latest project – a guitar she had been putting together for the last couple of months, it struck her that guitar technology has not changed in over 80 years. It consisted of strings, magnetic pickups, and potentiometers. The strings and pickups made the sound. The potentiometers adjusted the frequencies of this sound in order to create different tones. Potentiometers are very basic electric components. She wondered if replacing the potentiometers with an electronic board wouldn’t unlock a greater range of tones. Knowing a thing or two about electronics, she started experimenting and ended up building a guitar with an equalizer for tone controls.

She absolutely loved it! She just loved the sound. The guitar gave her fine control over tone making it very adaptable to any kind of music; and it didn’t compromise the signature sound of her guitar since she hadn’t change anything else. By adjusting other parts(Strings, tremolo, tuning, etc), she could make it produce a range of sounds and tones that she wasn’t sure she had heard before. Nothing like this existed in the market. This single-component completely changed what the guitar could do.

She envisioned that in the hands of talented musicians, this guitar could make the kind of music nobody had heard before.

Aria was very active on guitar forums and online communities in general. Also, she knew quite a few musicians and luthiers who made custom guitars. She wondered if it were possible to build and sell these guitars to make a business of it.

High-quality custom guitars typically cost over $1200. She wondered if she could price “The Aria” (It was a little vain, but it made for a great name for her guitar) at a premium over that and market it through custom guitar shops. She also wondered if she was better off just selling the equalizer component online, so hobbyists and luthiers could use it to build guitars.

Aria’s vision is pretty audacious and the product itself appears to have enormous possibilities. Narrowing this idea down to a testable MVP will need some work.