In this article, we’ll show you how we’ve validated a few different product ideas and came to the same outcome for different reasons.
Product Ideas
Our Goal
To validate these ideas in order to decide whether it’s worth building the product and further allocation of our resources.
- To confirm the need for these apps in the market.
- To confirm that we can introduce new features and users are ready to pay for them.
Market Research
Competitor Analysis
To show detailed competitors analysis we’ve chosen two the most popular apps (for each idea) which are generating the highest revenue among other competitors. You can see overall downloads among all competitors in the diagrams below each idea for better visibility.
Pack your backpack
Judging the information on this diagram, we see PackPoint app is leading by overall downloads. Despite this fact, revenue metrics are really low for this niche even for the most popular apps.
5-min books
We see that Blinkist and Headway are the two main players in the market with a big teams of professionals which are generating high-quality content. There are a lot of competitors but they’re less popular.
So, we can assume that if we want to develop an app in this niche, we need to compete not only with a lot of competitors but also with two big popular ones.
Postcrossing
Here we see that TouchNote app has taken more than 60% of the market and it’s free for users. That’s why it’ll be really complicated to create something valuable so users will be ready to pay.
Main Conclusions
Overall Summary
As you can see from the whole analysis, we had three different ideas with different metrics and key features but we found major factors that prevented us from further analysis.
- Plenty of free apps together with alternative ways to cover user’s needs — seen with ‘Pack your backpack’ idea.
- The revenue of each app in the niche was very low — mostly less than 5k last month — both ‘Pack your backpack’ and ‘Postcrossing’.
- Great implementation of existing apps together with high-quality content (‘5-min books’ idea).
- Super simple idea makes building a unique product harder together with finding killer-features or just features for which users are ready to pay (‘Postcrossing’ idea).
As a result, we stopped our investigation for all ideas and agreed that we’re not proceeding with them. Actually, it’s also a great result to stop work on time and not to spend resources further.
Thanks to Viktoria Muha and the Product Management team for this case study 🙏