What’s the best way to validate my hardware idea?
The rule of thumb is to build a “cardboard” (ie. very rough) prototype ASAP. Use off-the-shelf, commodity hardware, if you can, to build the proof-of-concept. Ideally you want to be a user of your own product. Can you build something that you’d actually buy? That alone will help put you on the right track.
One of the areas we see people go wrong is letting a product experiment linger too long. You have to kill the idea if you find very few people are experiencing the problem the product aims to solve (or if the problem is not a high-pain problem). Sometimes it’s scary to do this but you must. Start with the expectation that 9 out of your 10 ideas will flop and be as rigorous as possible in determining the market need for what you’re building.
I know that advice is general – here’s an article with more details and concrete examples.
We always strongly recommend using the customer discovery framework in the Mom Test Book. A must read for any hardware startup!
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There is a lot of great material for testing products/product ideas in general. Steve Blank’s Customer Discovery books are the go to for startups these days but these materials are not specific towards hardware (in fact they more focused on software: consumer apps and SaaS).
A very cheap but very effective (if done right) method for both hardware and software startups to validate/test their idea:
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Create a Twitter account for your startup, make sure the twitter bio is both clear in describing your value prop and concise in wording.
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Go to Fiverr and buy 3000-5000 followers for $5 bucks. These followers are “fake” but their value is to provide social validation for your target Twitter audience.
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Use a tool like Hootsuite or Tweepi to follow followers of large accounts that are in a similar space. For example if your designing 3-D printed hardware you would follow followers of accounts like MakerBot because you know MakerBot followers are interested in 3-D printing and therefore pre-dispositioned to have an interested to what your designing.
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The people you follow will get notified when someone else follows them. Unless they are large accounts with above 10k followers then they won’t notice, that’s why you should target smaller accounts of just everyday people that you have determined could be interested in your product. Once you follow them they will read your Twitter bio and follow you back if they are interested.
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Link to your landing page on your Twitter profile and post Tweets of pictures/videos of your hardware design/prototype product.
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The key metric to look at is not the amount/percent of people that follow you back (some have auto follow back functions added to their account and some just follow back for the kicks). The key metrics that really matter is how many people convert to the landing page (which is a true indicator of interest) and how many people retweet/favourite your picture/video Tweets. Those two should give a good indicator as to how many people are interested in your hardware design and the level of interest they are at.
This also can be a good way to go viral and be a start of a following that can be carried on to a Kickstarter campaign.
Hope this helps!
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