Event

Confirm pain points of the customer

By organizing and promoting an event, you are looking to confirm that your audience has the pain points you expect they have (the ones your event promises answer to).

Utilizing events as a method to test market viability offers a unique blend of direct customer engagement and practical market research. By organizing an event, entrepreneurs can validate the existence of a problem among their target audience and test whether they are willing to pay for a solution. This approach is particularly beneficial when the end goal is to launch a digital product, as it allows for an initial evaluation of the content or processes intended for digital delivery. The event serves as a “smoke test”, providing early indicators of market interest and potential.

Setting apart time to join a webinar is investing time in a topic and what you have to say and qualifies as a small hurdle. Attending a physical event signifies a larger hurdle and thus more data reliability. Furthermore, getting users to pay for event access, you are confirming willingness to pay to solve their problem.

Smoke test your content product

If your final intended product is a book, an online course or similarly represent a content product, putting on event to gauge demand is a quick, cheap, and easy way to do so.

Putting up an event increases learning velocity by scaling customer discovery up one step above one-to-one interviews. Further more, delivering content in front of a live audience provide for a great opportunity to probe whether the audience responds with excitement, understanding, and requests for more.

Events that smoke test customer interest and demand can take many forms:

• Meetup group
• Peer-to-Peer events (unconferences)
• Mini half-day conferences
• Gamestyle show
• A trip together
• Support groups
• Networking and drinks
• Support groups
• Conferences (online and offline)
• Webinars
• Live video streaming (i.e. Facebook & LinkedIn live streaming)

Understanding market interest

The core purpose of hosting an event in this context is to answer critical questions about the market. These include gauging who is genuinely interested in the problem you aim to solve, determining effective ways to reach your target demographic, assessing their willingness to pay for a solution, and understanding their preferences and reasons for interest. An event can thus act as a litmus test, revealing the market’s pulse.

To effectively use events as a validation tool, it’s essential to be clear about the learning objectives from the outset. A well-defined cutoff value helps in determining the event’s success in terms of market validation. However, care must be taken to avoid biases, especially in the sales approach. Overly aggressive sales tactics might skew the results, making it difficult to ascertain whether interest is genuine or a byproduct of persuasive selling.

Benefits from the events experiment

Although events themselves can serve as reliable interest and problem validation, they can also help provide a series of other benefits that will help you build your audience:

• Gathering qualified leads (test your channel)
• Upsell or presell of other products or services

Breaks during your event are great opportunities for you to consolidate what you have learned. Breaks provide excellent unstructured time to interview your target audience.