Idea Validation In iOS Dev Part 1

I was going to make today’s post all about idea validation and market research. The idea is to sufficiently find out if there is a need or want for the idea you have. I decided in the end to just give a taste of that in this post. The reasoning being that, this site is mostly aimed at developers just starting out in their journey, who are just beginning to learn iOS development, and trying to force someone to find out if there is a need for their idea before they even know how to build their idea might be more harmful than helpful. So I’ll just give a brief overview of a few quick ways I’ll be using to gauge interest.

The amazing thing about the internet is that if you know where to look, you’ll find the group of people you’re looking for, and if your idea has any sort of target audience, you can likely find them on Reddit. So I’ll start my first example there. Just as a refresher, the project for this series I’m building is a Stephen King app, and gives easy access to information on everything King related, on top of interesting trivia. So naturally, this will take me to the Stephen King subreddit.

If I were going to go fully in depth with this idea validation stage, it would consist of going to as many sources of Stephen King fans I could find, for example the Stephen King subreddit, and any other King related subreddit I could find. It would consist of building ads and split testing them to see what King fans respond to. It would consist of building a landing page for the app, even before it was finished to gauge interest and collect email addresses. It would consist of keyword research to find which books are his most popular to help me decide which quizzes I could include to drum up the most excitement, but today, I’ll stop here at gauging interest in this subreddit.

My minimum viable product comes down to my app having interesting trivia, but I don’t have to create an app to validate that people would be interested in a trivia app. I can actually cut straight to the chase, and ask the people in this subreddit some of the trivia I plan on including in the app, and see how many people are interested. And out of all the people who are interested, who would be willing to sign up on the landing page to be notified when the app comes out. Thats the beautiful thing about idea validation. You don’t have to go through the entire process of building an app to have some kind of understanding what the interest is in what you’re making, and if it’s worth making.

This process should ideally be long and thorough, but in the interest of this series, and time, I’ll be moving forward on the premise that I have validated this idea, and it’s well, a valid one. As we move forward with this series of posts, I’l revisit this topic in a part two. After consideration, I thought that it would be more helpful to readers to move forward at full steam, because a lot of people have more trouble seeing an idea through to the end than coming up with a good idea, and I know personally in the beginning with anything I’ve ever done, if I gave myself the excuse of “researching” instead of actually “building”, I’d fall down that rabbit hole and never get out.

The next post will be about creating a mock up, user journey mapping, and prototyping to make sure you work out all the kinks of your app before you start building it, it’s a lot easier to revise when you’re just working with a mock up than continually changing your code on a whim.

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