Today, Rethink Files is a growing startup that unifies all of your Cloud files in one place. But three years ago, it was only an idea—one that is remarkably different from the Rethink you know today.

Product validation, or the process of determining if people would pay us for our product, was essential to our success.

At Rethink, we validated seven products before finding product-market fit. Throughout the process, I got to work with several extraordinary marketing gurus who were able to validate products with only minimal engineering time spent on landing pages.

It took a long time to develop a successful product-market fit loop for learning about our customers’ needs, but we worked out the kinks in the process and found one that makes sense. Here is the step-by-step process we successfully used to test opportunities.

0. Come up with the idea.

The first step in this process is the hardest part: identifying an opportunity to build a product. Discovering valuable, unsolved problems is difficult, but executing on an effective solution without exposure to end users is impossible.

However, product validation is possible when you start with something to actually “feed the loop,” so to speak. Make sure to spend some time carefully considering what problem you want to solve with your new product. Once you believe you have a valuable product concept, the most important part is being able to articulate what it is that you’ll be building and how it will change your users’ lives.

It’s critical that you avoid becoming caught up in the art of any one solution. As an entrepreneur, and especially as an engineer, it can be easy to get distracted by how elegantly implemented something could be… But the point of the loop is to find out if users will actually use it.

Once you start this validation loop with your initial product idea, you will begin to generate the data needed to hone it into a business capable of carving out a healthy section of the market that will eventually present itself. The work required by the loop can take weeks before you will get results useful for decision making, and you also need to be ready to repeat the effort until you feel truly confident in your business.

1. Build your landing page.

With a concept in hand, you’re ready to set up a landing page that provides a good overview of your product and its key features.

The page’s call-to-action (CTA) button(s) should open a modal that can collect an email and send it to a waitlist. Set up an email marketing tool like MailChimp or SendGrid to aggregate the collected emails. MailChimp has vastly better email list management features, but SendGrid’s WYSIWYG email builder is simpler to use and produces better-looking emails.

Next, set up Google Analytics. It is crucial for the site to be a validation engine and is important for ads.

Within the email collection modal, we set up several Google analytics events. One tracked each time the modal was opened, and a second tracked each time someone submitted their email. This was useful to measure how changes to the content of the modal itself impact conversion.

When users submit their email, show a success message within the modal and ask them to take a short survey. The survey is extremely helpful for understanding the market and will also help narrow ad audiences.

Use Typeform or Google Forms to create this 5-10 question survey that will collect basic demographic information and open-ended answers about user needs. Typeform is generally better for an embedded form experience, but Google Forms has a better single-page experience which can help the form feel more approachable.

A business that has successfully utilized the survey method to understand their users is Superhuman. Surveys also worked well for Rethink, and our most recent one could be a helpful starting place for your own.

2. Drive traffic to your new marketing site.

Now it’s time to drive traffic to your new site and begin building your waitlist.

To start, make the site live on your domain. Using a tool like Ahrefs or SEMRush, research relevant Google search keywords on which to bid. Look for a good balance of search volume and competition (i.e. how many others are also bidding on the keyword).

We had a lot of success with Google Ads. However, depending on what you’re validating, Facebook may be a very powerful tool as well. Generally business-to-consumer marketing content will perform better on Facebook than business-to-business.

We used Google Ads to set up a search campaign targeting about ten keywords. We also ran a display campaign and saw great results, even with just basic graphics using stock images and text.

Ads are hands down the simplest way to get a high volume of traffic. Obviously, it's also worth sharing your new site within your network and on other forums, but those channels can exclude potential customers that ads will not.

Ultimately, ads may not be the most effective channel to reach key user segments. However, ads will give you the best chance to reach the greatest number of users with the least effort. Once you’ve successfully validated a product, channels like direct or inside sales, affiliates, or SEO may be worth exploring.

3. Learn from your potential customers.

Potential customers who join the waitlist can also be presented with the option to schedule a brief call. You’d be surprised by how many interested potential customers will take the time to learn about your product and answer questions about their needs.

Use a tool like Calendly to make scheduling low-touch. Once speaking with potential customers, try to identify if they truly have a similar problem to the one you're aiming to solve. Discuss if they've thought about how they would solve it themselves.

If they have, it's a good sign that there's enough of a pain point for them to seek a solution. Try to understand how acute the problem is and what a solution is worth to them. Based on their answers, ask what they feel a comfortable price range for the solution is. Try to provide a set of two to four specific ranges that you believe fit your product's economics and value. Determining a definite price point will come after deciding on a product to build.

4. Decide: to build or not to build.

This product-market fit validation loop should provide you with enough data to make a call on whether your current product concept is worth building, or if you should go in another direction. Does the data make you feel that it will be worth spending the next year of your life building the product you just validated?

If you can confidently answer ‘yes’, it’s time to start building.

If there doesn’t seem to be enough of an opportunity, re-run the loop.

In the most likely scenario, you will uncover a few positive data points showing there may be an opportunity. Keep collecting data and work to assess what made the product interesting. Adjust the product using what you learned from customers. Use this more focused concept to run through the loop once again.

Finding product market fit is about generating as much data as possible. This loop helped us to not only make decisions about the specific ideas that were worth further investment, but also to understand how to proceed when they weren’t. Ultimately, the objective for us was to feel confident about making a long-term commitment to a direction for our product, and running through this loop numerous times gave us the information to successfully make that decision.

Rethink Files Beta Program

The Product-Market Fit Validation Loop: A Technical Founder’s Guide to Understanding Your Market