Survey Results
Idea Reality Check
Barb Nelson
Insights
You should run an Idea Reality Check before committing significant time, budget, or team capacity to any new product initiative. Early product decisions lock in assumptions that are difficult—and expensive—to unwind later. Markets look attractive from a distance, internal capabilities are often overestimated, and competitive pressure is easy to misread without evidence.
A simple, consistent assessment—like this survey—forces teams to separate enthusiasm from readiness and highlights where learning is still required. Strong ideas don’t fail because they lack vision; they fail because risk goes unexamined until it shows up as missed targets, delayed launches, or quiet market rejection.
Even promising ideas benefit from an early reality check; fragile ideas depend on it.
Recommendations to consider
Your Score
8 out of 18
We asked:
For the product idea you’re evaluating, answer the following questions. If the answer is unclear, choose Unknown. Uncertainty is valuable input—it highlights where risk still exists.
Your responses
Market
Sales Experience
1
.
Does your sales team have experience selling to this buyer?
Your response: Unknown
Selling to a new buyer isn’t just a messaging problem—it’s a learning curve. Different buyers value different outcomes, use different language, and evaluate risk differently. If your sales team hasn’t sold to this buyer before, expect longer sales cycles, more stalled deals, and higher dependency on product and leadership support early on.
Market
Market Track Record
2
.
Have you successfully sold products into this market segment?
Your response: Unknown
A “Yes” here indicates more than awareness—it signals proof that customers in this segment will buy from you. A “No” doesn’t mean the idea is wrong, but it does mean you’re entering discovery mode, not execution mode. Market entry risk should be planned, funded, and staffed deliberately.
Market
Customer Proof
3
.
Do you have customer success stories for this market segment?
Your response: Yes
Success stories demonstrate that customers not only buy—but achieve outcomes. Without them, marketing claims lack credibility and sales teams rely on promises instead of proof. If this is missing, expect heavier reliance on pilots, references, and executive involvement to establish trust.
Capabilities
Domain Expertise
4
.
Do you have expertise in this domain or industry?
Your response: Yes
Domain expertise shapes product decisions, prioritization, and credibility with customers. Without it, teams tend to underestimate complexity and overestimate speed. If expertise exists but is scarce or unavailable, this still represents a delivery risk—not a checkbox win.
Capabilities
Category Experience
5
.
Have you previously delivered products in this product category?
Your response: No
Experience in a product category matters because patterns repeat—buyer expectations, pricing norms, adoption challenges, and support needs. If this category is new, plan for more iterations, more mistakes, and more rework before achieving product-market fit.
Capabilities
Technology Familiarity
6
.
Is the basic technology familiar to your team?
Your response: No
“Familiar” doesn’t mean theoretically understood—it means used, debugged, and supported in real products. Unfamiliar technology increases delivery risk, lengthens timelines, and shifts effort from solving customer problems to solving internal ones. That trade-off should be intentional, not accidental.
Competitive
Competitive Awareness
7
.
Are the dominant competitive players familiar to your team?
Your response: Unknown
If you don’t understand who customers compare you to, you don’t understand how buying decisions are made. Competitive unfamiliarity leads to weak positioning, reactive roadmaps, and sales conversations that miss what actually matters to buyers.
Competitive
Proven Demand
8
.
Is there clear evidence that customers already purchase similar solutions from competitors?
Your response: Yes
This question tests demand, not differentiation. If customers are already buying similar solutions, the risk shifts from “Does the market exist?” to “Why would they choose us?” If no one is buying anything like this, you may be inventing a market—and that requires far more time, capital, and patience.
Competitive
Lost Deals
9
.
Have you lost deals because you do not have this product?
Your response: Unknown
Lost deals are one of the strongest signals of unmet demand—but only when the reason is clear and consistent. If deals are lost sporadically or anecdotally, this may indicate edge cases rather than a scalable opportunity. Pattern matters more than passion here.
Comments
Final Thoughts
10
.
Anything else you want to share?
Your response: Testing the survey
Next Steps
The right next step after this assessment is almost never “start building.” It is to deliberately reduce risk in the areas that matter most—before the market does it for you. This typically means engaging directly with the relevant buyer and user personas to understand how they solve the problem today, what alternatives they consider, and what triggers a buying decision. In parallel, validate internal assumptions by involving sales, product, and technical leaders to confirm whether required capabilities, expertise, and technology are truly in place or would need to be developed or acquired.
The goal is not to prove the idea is good, but to determine whether it can realistically succeed given your market position, organizational capabilities, and competitive reality.
