Before spending a lot of money to build a product, use AI to verify your entrepreneurial idea

What is this article talking about?

The biggest risk in starting a business idea is that no one will actually use it after you make it. This article compiles a set of "real demand investigation methods": three questioning methods, VJPD verification framework, commitment signal scoring, plus an AI consultant instruction that can be directly copied, allowing you to see the risks before investing in costs. The mental method comes from Rob Fitzpatrick’s classic book “The Mom Test”. Who is

Three tips for asking questions: Stop asking polite words

The most interesting thing to look at is:

• Bad question: "What do you think of an app that automatically organizes meeting minutes?" Good question: "How did you process the meeting minutes after the last important meeting? How long did it take?"
• Bad question: “If this feature were available, would you be willing to pay for it?” Good question: “In the past year, have you paid for any tools to solve this problem? What is your budget?”
• Bad question: “Do you think this feature is important?” Good question: “What were the direct consequences of this problem last time it happened?”

Real case: I almost gave the solution directly

A director of a cultural and educational foundation came to me and asked, "Can you help us design a more automated system to collect feedback from the audience after lectures?" I immediately answered yes, I will use the official LINE to collect and AI, and I will write a plan when I get back.

After thinking about it, is it really right for me to give the solution directly? Will the audience really have any ideas after listening to the lecture? Do they really want to share? Who are they actually shared with? I realized that before I could plan a plan, I had to figure out what was really going on. So I changed to doing interviews first. The core mentality is: I am here to understand the problem, and put down the sales plan first.

The core sequence of the entire strategy is: first verify the problem, then design the process, and finally select the tool. Just the opposite of most people’s intuition.

VJPD Framework: Turning Verification into Four Steps

VJPD is four verification dimensions: V verification problem (Validate, is the pain point real), J judgment impact (Judge, how much does it cost), P exploration behavior (Probe, how to solve it now), D user portrait (Demographics, who is this). The actual operation is four steps:

Step zero, first define the core hypothesis in one sentence, and write down the target users, pain points, frequency, time cost, and existing solutions:

The first step, qualitative interview: Find 5 to 8 target users, conduct semi-structured interviews for 30 to 60 minutes, focusing on collecting original words and specific scenarios. The second step is a quantitative questionnaire: convert the interview findings into checkable frequency, time cost, and pain point options, and verify them with more than a hundred audiences. The third step is to analyze the commitment signal:

• 0 points (invalid): "This is a great idea!"
• 1 point (Interest): "Sounds good, I might use it."
• 2 points (time commitment): “I am willing to schedule 30 minutes to watch the demo next week.”
• 3 points (famous promise): "I can introduce you to other teachers in the department."
• 4 points (monetary commitment): "Is there an education program? You can pay to try it now."

The fourth step is iterative decision-making: if 2 to 4 points account for more than 60% of the signals, continue to advance; if 1 to 2 points are the majority but point to other pain points, adjust the direction; if 0 to 1 points account for the majority, give up decisively and leave money for the next idea. There is no need for an MVP to build a product first. A questionnaire, a registration page, a mini-class, an interview, as long as a signal of commitment can be seen.

Leave the entire method to the AI consultant

The above framework may be a bit difficult to read for the first time, let alone apply it immediately to the problem at hand. So I organized it into an AI consultant instruction, copy and paste it, and AI will help you become familiar with this set of thinking while doing it (it is recommended to use a model with reasoning function):

It does two things: it serves as your "question quality controller" and rewrites each polite question into a question that digs out real behaviors; it serves as your "interview strategist" and helps you generate an interview plan from scratch. The complete version of instructions and cases is included inReal demand investigation method skill package(can be downloaded directly).

How you can start: Write down three hypotheses

Before making any product, do these four things:

1. Break the idea into three testable hypotheses, and write each sentence in the format of "who, what pain point, how often it happens, how much it costs, and how to solve it now."
2. Post the hypothesis to the AI ​​consultant, ask it to design interview questions, and first select the questions that violate the three major mental rules.
3. Find 5 to 8 real target users to talk about past experiences and write down the original words.
4. Use commitment signals to score and face the results honestly: Is it praise, or a commitment of time, fame, or money?

This will be much more stable than investing in the complete product from the beginning. It is far cheaper to have an idea rejected by a validation framework than a product rejected by the market.