Hm, there are lots of posts on this subreddit asking how to market. Maybe contact some of the OPs and ask what they think?

I feel like 90% of the folks in this subreddit live and breathe market validation already, so they may not be your target customers.

But, echoing the other point below that a lot of startups don’t have money. And the ones who do have money, probably have business cofounders who know how to do this already. So you may have to hunt a bit to find folks with money who don’t know market validation.

Think about this for a second, if your process worked, why wouldn’t you have used it to validate this idea? Unless your process involves posting to reddit…

TBH ! As a founder in the customer validation and literally working on shoestring budget. If the value prop is right I will not mind, but you will need to have a strong value proposition ( like no charge unless so much conversion etc ) atleast at the start. If you are selling shovels you have to make sure your buyers ( atleast a large percentage) find gold .

The approach and the pricing here cannot be a one-size-fit for all types. As a professional market researcher I’m doing this too.

Your target audience has very limited $ to spend so if you want to charge higher (and confident that you can deliver exceptional insights), then aim startups who have raised significant funding like Series A or beyond.

The immediate problem that comes to mind is the customers you want to sell to generally have no money to spend at the validation stage. So…?

Idea validation process is really difficult. If you do this through real users and not by AI, then give it a try.

I already do concept testing/customer interviews for startups, and have worked with a product strategy consulting group that did the whole package for startups similar to what you’re describing. There’s absolutely no shortage of people who want and need it, but unfortunately very few startups have the cash upfront to pay for the hours of labor it takes to create those deliverables. Five good-quality customer interviews alone are about $500 in labor end-to-end, what you’re describing is definitely over a thousand.

So you pretty much can’t set a price that the average startup owner finds appealing, you have to convince them that even though it costs, it makes more sense to pay for 20 hours of your labor than waste hundreds of hours of their own labor going in the wrong direction.

I am paid by economic development organizations to do this work, and there is a problem with perception when a person hires a contractor or consultant to do market validation work.

The entrepreneur will think that they are paying you to “prove their idea works.” They are looking for you to “validate” and if you don’t, then they will doubt your methods and your effort.

Now, I push all the work on the teams and provide educational materials and tools for them to do “customer discovery.”

If there is no grant to fund this work or if there is no promise of angel investment at the end, 50% of teams won’t do more than 1 interview. 90% won’t do more than 15. My best teams will do 30+, and if there is a financial incentive like the NSF I-Corps program, some will do 100+

If I were you, I’d pivot either into educational tools or providing a tool that makes it easier to find leads, setup interviews, ask good questions, and capture notes (like Innovation Within).

Alternatively, work with the funders to create a mechanism where you can verify the interviews have been completed and that they are accurate.

How would this service differ from others that already exist to help validate products? A few that come to mind are dscout, Nielsen, even things like Google Surveys.
As other have mentioned, budget would be the biggest constraint for startups. They should be doing this kind of UX Research and product validation in-house.

The intent is sound. There is a problem = founders don’t validate ideas well and don’t know how to do marketing to do so. Generally.

Arguably, that is the leading cause of failure and why so many startups fail.

Here’s the rub: Founders need to learn how to do this and have the skill, because it’s a never ending process

Startups have no money

So while the intent is based on a very valid problem and solution, I think you’re going to struggle. People have been working on this challenge for at least as long as I’ve been in startups (25 years) and in my perspective, the only thing that will work is :

1. More VCs and service providers sponsoring incubators so we can teach more founders properly and not pass the cost on to them

2. Fixing what people think marketing means and does, so founders prioritize

3. Create a lot more freely available content about how to validate ideas. Flood the internet with it.

I think it’s a decent idea. Outsourced operations exists so founders can focus on sales and building product. If you could offer product ops for less than the product founder or person values their time at it’d be valuable.