We all have ideas that excite us and visions of innovations that could drive real impact. But moving from ideas in your head to concrete products in the market, creating that impact, is quite challenging. Across endeavors like entrepreneurship, social innovation, scientific research, and more, one of the most common pitfalls is turning ideas into impact.
This article walks through a a step-by-step guide to developing impactful products by taking ideas and transforming them into solutions for real user needs. Now, let’s get into it.
Evaluate and Select Your Best Idea
You likely have many ideas you think could add value. Try writing out all of them before assessing which is most promising to pursue first. For each, consider criteria like:
- Feasibility: Do you have the skills and resources to reasonably develop and launch this?
- Potential Value: If it succeeds, how much positive impact could this create?
- Personal Passion: How excited are you about this particular problem space and customers?
Choose just one idea that scores well across those dimensions to focus your efforts on. Say you have an idea for a mobile app that connects new immigrants to volunteer mentors to ease their transition. This likely deeply resonates with your experience as an immigrant trying to adjust to your new home country. There seems to be strong need in your local community. And you have friends with app development skills who could collaborate. That checks all 3 boxes.
Understand Your Audience
Now it’s time to dive deeper into the target users and customers for your potential product – really empathize with their situation and needs.
For the mentor matching app, good places to start include: talking to new immigrants about their most pressing questions and hurdles, looking at stats on outcomes for new immigrants in your area to identify struggles, researching what existing options exist to get them helpful information, and estimating the size of the recent immigrant population which indicates your potential market.
The goal is to clarify that you understand users’ needs, challenges, behaviors and context to inform your solution.
Plan and Design Your Viable Product
With a focused target audience and problem area in mind, you can start designing an initial product, keeping things simple. Outline just enough core features to enable users to get the basics of the solution you envision.
In our example, key elements could include: new immigrant user profiles with attributes like languages spoken, mentor user profiles with offerings like language tutoring, a simple heuristic matchmaking algorithm, secure messaging for matched pairs, and a portal for user feedback to the app provider.
Sketch some basic app interface workflows and screens. Also draft up the high-level technology architecture, identifying things like: mobile app on iOS and Android, cloud server and database to store user data and run matching algorithm, email/notification system, payment integration.
Validate with Customers
Before you invest heavily in building anything, look for evidence that users want your proposed solution. Create an attractive landing page explaining concepts from the user’s point of view and run digital ads directing your target audience to it. If you get significant traffic and interest, it’s a good signal of demand.
You can also show your sketches and feature descriptions directly to target users in your area and get their feedback. Would this address their needs? How might they improve or change it? You’re looking for validation that you understand the right problem and are headed in the right direction before spending months building an MVP. If interest seems weak, you likely need to revisit understanding your audience.
Develop, Launch, and Iterate
With customer validation in hand, you can start creating a minimum viable product (MVP) – the simplest thing you can build that enables the core value.
For our app, the first version should include at least: profile creation, match algorithm, communication channel between matches. Release this MVP to engage early adopters who are often more forgiving of new products and eager to influence them. They become critical sources of feedback to drive your learning and improvement.
Pay close attention to how they actually use the product vs your assumptions. Which features do they adopt readily vs ignore? Where do they run into usability issues or bugs? What additional needs come to light that the MVP doesn’t address? Use their real experience rather than your guesses to prioritize how to evolve the product iteratively.
Execute and Deliver Value
There you have the key phases in going from ideas to products that deliver concrete value to users:
- Evaluating and selecting a promising idea
- Understanding target users deeply
- Designing a simple viable product
- Validating demand before you build
- Launching a minimum feature set to early adopters
- Gathering user feedback to guide evolution
Final Thoughts: Turning Ideas Into Impact
While this presents a logical sequence, in reality expect the process to be a bit messy. You will likely cycle back through steps as you learn more. The time spent upfront selecting ideas, understanding your audience, and validating demand pays off enormously versus building for months before testing market appetite.
And the most important thing is that you don’t have to do it alone. At Aalos Consulting, we’ve helped 100s of start-ups and small businesses in turning ideas into impact and real life solutions. To get started, click here to book a free consultation with us.