Hi. I'm Amy, the Founder and Chief Marketing Person here at the Launch Box. My mission is to help entrepreneurs and small business owners achieve their dreams by learning how to think more like a marketer.
Today, we're diving into the world of cutting-edge tech to talk about how to supercharge the idea validation process. Yup, you guessed it — we're talking about the magical world of Artificial Intelligence, and we’ve got the inside scoop from 10 CEOs, founders, and industry trailblazers on how you can use AI to help you confirm your next big thing is indeed the next big thing! How cool is that?
🕵️ Psst: I don’t want to write another boring story about using AI to streamline workflow any more than you want to read one, so I’m trying a new spin and focusing on tips for using AI to help with business idea validation. Please give me a shoutout if I’ve succeeded and say thank you to the kind folks who contributed to the roundup.
From conducting a trend analysis to performing a keyword analysis, here are the AI powered recommendations these experts shared with me.
Tips for Using AI for Business Idea Validation:
Conduct a Trend Analysis
Run a Paid Advertising Campaign
Empower Your SEO Research
Get a Geographic Data Analysis
Generate Arguments for Validation
Employ a Demand Forecasting Model
Leverage for Sentiment Analysis
Analyze Your Competitors
Identify Patterns in Sentiment
Perform a Keyword Analysis
Conduct a Trend Analysis
When you're building a new product or service, you want to make sure that you're building it for a market that actually exists. One way to do that is to use the power of AI to analyze huge masses of data and identify trends.
If you're launching a new type of content marketing, for example, you can use AI to analyze millions of blog posts and identify trends in the types of words and phrases that people are using most often. This will help you understand what kind of content is going to resonate with your audience and get them to click through to your website.
Run a Paid Advertising Campaign
One of the best ways to validate demand for a new product or service is to simply run a small paid advertising campaign on an ads platform to see if your target customers will respond. After all, if your product actually existed in the world, you would need to market it to this target audience and see if it engages with your advertising—so why not test it out before you build the product? In the age of AI, it's easier than ever to design such a paid marketing campaign.
Tools such as Stable Diffusion and Dalle 2 can design images for use in your ad campaign, and ChatGPT, or even a paid service like Jasper AI, can generate dozens of versions of potential copy for use in a Facebook ad or Google search campaign. If your test campaign obtains a good click-through rate—which can vary, depending on your product—that's a good sign to try to move your product closer to reality.
Alec Lindsay, Founder, Baxter, Inc.
Empower Your SEO Research
When you are trying to determine consumer demand, it's important to search beyond "who's looking" for your product and shift over to the category that needs your product. AI tools used in SEO can help you understand the total volume for a topic which can give you insights into the number of people who are within your target market and would consider purchasing your product.
Through AI-driven research, you can search for related topics where people are facing problems that your product solves or where people are looking for an "upgrade" from their current choice.
Jason Vaught, Founder and CSO, 805SEO
Get a Geographic Data Analysis
Using AI to analyze geographic data can reveal unexpected patterns and insights related to the distribution of potential customers and help identify untapped markets. For example, analyzing data on population density and income levels could reveal that a certain area has a high demand for a product or service but is underserved by competitors.
This method could also be used in conjunction with other methods, such as analyzing search engine or social media data, to get a more complete picture of demand.
Roy Lau, Co-founder, 28 Mortgage
Generate Arguments for Validation
If you want to validate demand for a new product or service, then have generative AI create arguments for and against the idea. Having it look at both sides will help you overcome your personal bias one way or the other.
For example, one of my key differentiators as a digital marketer is that I develop data-driven stories. To validate the idea, I start with an affirmative prompt like, "Write a strong argument for a publicity startup to incorporate data-driven stories into the marketing product that they sell to their clients."
Then, I would follow with a negative prompt where I change "to incorporate" to "not to incorporate" and compare the results. If I am able to reinforce the positive ideas and refute the negative ideas, then I have validated the service.
Dennis Consorte, Digital Marketing and Leadership Consultant for Startups, Snackable Solutions
Employ a Demand Forecasting Model
One recommendation is to employ AI-powered demand forecasting models. By leveraging historical sales data, market trends, and external factors, such as economic indicators or competitor activities, these models can generate accurate predictions of future demand. This enables businesses to assess market potential, and make data-driven decisions regarding production, pricing, and marketing strategies.
Additionally, conducting sentiment analysis using AI techniques on customer feedback, reviews, and social media conversations can help validate demand. By extracting sentiments and opinions expressed by potential customers, businesses can gauge the overall perception and acceptance of their new product or service, identify pain points or areas of improvement, and make adjustments to align with customer expectations.
Lastly, deploying AI-driven recommendation systems can provide valuable insights into customer preferences, and engagement with the recommended offerings.
Diana Royanto, Content Writer, Milkwhale
Leverage for Sentiment Analysis
To leverage AI in validating demand for a new product or service, we recommend utilizing sentiment analysis on social media platforms.
By analyzing customer conversations and feedback, AI algorithms can gauge public opinion and identify potential demand patterns. For example, utilizing AI-powered sentiment analysis, a tech company discovered a growing trend of customers expressing frustration with the lack of a specific feature in existing products.
This insight prompted them to develop a new product addressing the identified gap, resulting in a 35% increase in sales within the first quarter of its launch. Leveraging AI-driven sentiment analysis provides actionable data-driven insights that help businesses validate demand, make informed decisions, and tailor their offerings to meet customer needs effectively.
Himanshu Sharma, CEO and Founder, Academy of Digital Marketing
Analyze Your Competitors
With AI, entrepreneurs can identify competitors and analyze their strengths and weaknesses. It helps start-up founders streamline the idea validation process by collecting and analyzing competitor data.
By doing so, they better understand the market and can develop strategies to differentiate themselves. AI can help entrepreneurs make informed decisions and move forward with their start-ups by accurately assessing ideas' potential, gathering feedback from potential customers, and analyzing competitors.
Marco Genaro Palma, Co-founder, TechNews180
Identify Patterns in Sentiment
As a CEO, my recommendation for using AI to validate demand for a new product or service is to leverage AI-powered market research and predictive analytics. AI can analyze large volumes of data from various sources, including social media, customer feedback, online reviews, and market trends, to provide valuable insights into customer preferences, behavior, and market demand.
One effective approach is to use AI algorithms to analyze customer conversations and sentiment on social media platforms and online forums. By monitoring discussions related to the problem or need your new product or service aims to address, AI can identify patterns, sentiments, and emerging trends. This analysis can help you understand customer pain points, assess their level of interest, and gauge the potential demand for your offering.
AI-powered predictive analytics can also be utilized to forecast demand for a new product or service.
Perform Keyword Analysis
You can use AI with a free tool like Google Trends to look for the monthly search volume and estimated trend growth for a keyword, a keyword cluster, or a full semantic “field” of keywords.
Coupling this with premium tools will yield the best, most accurate results; however, it's not strictly necessary if you're just looking for research from an initial top-level perspective, to begin with.
Wendy Makinson, HR Manager, Joloda Hydraroll
