The problem
Starting a new business brings a common problem. Will the market accept your business idea? This problem gets twice as hard if your business idea needs a lot of money to start.
To lower the risks, you typically need to do market studies, customer surveys, and possibly build a prototype of your product. But this also requires a lot of money and work.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a service that could quickly evaluate the potential of your idea?
The solution
Validated uses AI to help businesses make decisions about their products using digital ads.
With Validated you can test your ideas with actual users before launching a real product. This helps determine the quality of the ideas, their potential, and how well the product’s message is understood.
Businesses can avoid launching a product that will not be successful. Fixing the product features at the design stage creates a product that customers will like and use regularly.
In fact, Validated improves the idea of using simple landing pages in test marketing programs at the initial stage of product launch.
As you probably know. if you are going to sell something but not sure in demand, a simple way to check it is to make a fake landing page for it and see if you can get some orders. At this stage, you’ll have an idea if you can attract your target customers and if they’re comfortable with the price.
Validated helps you to streamline this process. The service can run hundreds of digital ads for your product to learn what consumers care about. While running these campaigns Validated collects objective data helping you to measure what is the response to one or another offer..
How it works
For instance, your upcoming product is an AI-driven chatbot that acts as your personal health and wellness guide. Your product’s proposed features include:
- AI-powered workout plans
- Mindfulness exercises
- Meal recipes
Validated will ask you what each feature brings to the customer. For “AI Powered Workout Plans” for example – it provides personalized workout plans for individual goals and can adjust the schedule if a workout is missed.
“Mindfulness exercises” can help users relax after a busy day, with features guiding them through breathing exercises.
“Meal prep recipes” can assist users in reaching their health goals nutritionally and simplify their grocery shopping.
Confirming this information Validated will create a series of ads to run on social media. However, before creating these ads, the platform will analyze your competitors and their promo materials. Using these materials as a reference, the platform will create sample ads for the major social media.
The ad will include necessary images, descriptions, and a call to action (CTA). There will be several variants for each product feature.
Running a test on your possible ads will give you useful data. This can help you decide if you need to change anything about your product.
For example, you will see that “Reduced Injuries” has 3.4% CTR, “Mindfulness” 1.9 % CTR, “Meal Prep” 1.5% CTR and “AI Powered Workouts” just 0.78% CTR.
Another insightful piece of data to analyze is gender and demographic stats.
In this case you will see the distribution of your potential customers by age and know that women respond more to your offer than men, i.e., 53% vs 47%.
What the customer finally gets?
The customer will get valuable data about how the market reacts to their offers. For example, with just $417, they can test how people respond to their planned product features. They can also evaluate Click-Through Rates (CTR) and the cost of acquiring a user. Plus, they’ll get demographic and other data.
In this example, Validated ran 80 unique ads and collect 993 clicks from 65K views. This amount of data should give the customer reliable statistic data to make future decisions.
Is Validated an AI platform?
Not exactly. Ads will be created by AI but supervised by marketing experts. Usually, each test campaign needs a lot of manual work, so Validated’s business model is more like an agency. A the same time, publishing the ad and collecting data is mostly automated.
What is good about Validated
As we mentioned at the very beginning the platform offers one but really useful feature. With Validated you can relatively easily, cheaply, and quickly run A/B tests, getting feedback from the market to prove your business ideas.
Instead of manually publishing such ad campaigns, gathering the data, and analyzing it, the customer can do it with an established and tested workflow proposed by Validated.
In most cases, it should be a good option for the customers of this startup, so there is real business value. Note that the company was established just six months ago but has already secured its first funding of $1.1M in a pre-seed round.
What you can copy
What we like about this startup is that their model is built around centralized ad publishing and analysis. This is an interesting approach because, essentially, if you are a business owner, you can place your ads and analyze the data yourself. However, since there are many advertisement platforms now like Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Youtube, etc., you will need to invest significant resources. Running such campaigns and analyzing them in one place should be pretty convenient.
Of course, there are many social media management platforms, for example Hootsuite. However, Validated narrowed down this niche, finding interesting application area.
This overlaps with another startup we reviewed just recently. Primetag is a tool that assists companies in handling their influencer marketing efforts that also recently secured $3.5 in funding.
Primetag not only helps you effectively run ad campaigns by finding the right influencers, but also assists in analyzing the results.
Efficient work with social media is a hot topic now, and we see many startups raising money in this field.
The company and funding
Validated was founded in July 2023 and received pre-seed funding of $1.1M on January 15, 2024.
The site: https://www.getvalidated.ai