Product Validation

When you are starting a new company, it's an exciting time.  You have an idea, a great idea, and you are looking down the path at how to make that vision come to fruition.

There are many things ahead -- getting the capital required to build the company, making the right decisions around what features to build into the product at what stage, how to best message your product to your customer, and figuring out who, exactly, your cusotmer is specifically.  That leaves out the minor things like hiring a team to build the product!

One of the greatest challanges in all of this -- common to all of these things -- is finding customers to talk to about your idea.  

Venture capital and angel investors want to hear about your idea from buyers -- they essentially want a potential customer to say "This is awesome, it solves my problem, and I'm going to buy it when it's available!"  

But more importantly, you should want to hear that!  Sure, investors are about to invest millions of dollars in your company.  But you are about to invest 4-8 years of your life in the same company.  Let's compare 8 years of life to the total time you have to work in the market, to the few million dollars a VC has compared to their total fund size....  Depressing, yes, but that makes it all the more critical to get solid, productive and accurate customer feedback early in your company formation, and to continue to get this feedback through-out the product life cycle. 

Cresting Wave has a circle of buyers who love to do exactly this -- sit down with super smart entreprenuers, hear about their exciting ideas, and help them understand how these ideas best fit into their current problem sets.  

This is a broad offering from Cresting Wave, but we have been helping startups with these things for almost a decade.  The use cases include:

• Product validation and evolution for new companies that are seeded with capital looking for their first investment.
• Diligence validation for initial and follow-on investment for Venture Capitalist and Angel investors. 
• Product featureset evalation and product roadmap creation
• Beta site acquisition 
• Investor references with CIO/Decision-maker customers