Bootstrapped Product Strategy Development: Affordable tools to test your products

Accelerate your new product development cycle with easy to use market research tools

One of the most significant challenges to young software companies is validating the premise that their product addresses a significant need in the market and provides value to its users. As a result, product managers need to constantly seek out feedback from the market even if their resources are limited.
Unfortunately, market research and validation is often an expensive and time consuming undertaking. These methodologies were created and perfected by large consumer brands such as P & G, who had virtually limitless resources at their disposal for market testing of products.

For bootstrapped organizations, sometimes market research and validation reflect an afterthought, most likely after the product creation is finalized and the product is sold to the very first group of early adopters. It is in the expansion stage, the transition from selling to early adopters to selling to the critical mass of mainstream buyers, that most companies realize the need for true market validation. Yet, they are often so limited on resources that crucial market intelligence and analysis must wait, sometimes until it is too late.

Fortunately, a crop of new companies surfaced that offer market research and testing services at very affordable prices while requiring minimal oversight and support. These companies provide exactly the type of services that will result in a much more agile and efficient startup product management process.

Here is a sampling of the market:

– On-demand panel at Askyourtargetmarket.com: Simplifying the panel recruiting and polling process, AskYourTargetMarket.com is a service that connects market researchers to potential respondents, allowing the researchers to specify the demographic set up of their target set, and ensure the results are reliable.

– On-demand qualitative market research at Gutcheck: Still in beta after raising venture capital, Gutcheck aims to dramatically simplify the qualitative research process by allowing researcher and respondent to readily connect via Web 2.0, thereby reducing the cost of performing research as well.

– On-demand user testing at UserTesting.com: The most well-established of the startups mentioned here, UserTesting.com offers very affordable user testing for any website or product with minimum hassle and great outputs.

At OpenView Labs, we continue to look for more resources and tools such as these to help our portfolio companies enhance their management processes. I will be very happy to learn and share of similar tools that help simplify the market research process.