Intake Guide / FAQ

Business Name

Testing messaging or in-market features
Scenario: You’re interested in how to position or message your business or product or if you’re interested in evaluating features that are already in-market

Suggestion
: Consider using your real business name to capture not only insights regarding the feature or message being evaluated, but sentiment on your brand. Alternatively, you can obscure your brand name behind a feigned name if you’d rather glean insights without divulging your business.
Testing features of a specific, stand-alone product
Scenario: You’re evaluating the features or messaging of a specific product or product line rather than more generic features of your business at-large.

Suggestion: Validated can run a study using your product name. This can be more effective than using your business name as product names are commonly more evocative of the product’s underlying features and value propositions than the business name is. You can use your product’s actual name or create a stand-in if you’d rather withhold the product’s real name.
Testing prospective or unrealized features
Scenario: You’re interested in testing business or product features that you have yet to develop or bring to market.

Suggestion
: Using a feigned or made-up business name enables you to gain insights without being potentially dilutive to your brand or unintentionally misdirecting prospective users.

Describing What You’re Building

We’re asking you to describe the essence of the “thing” you’re evaluating.

If you’re testing product features, tell us the core product that underlies all the existing or potential features. What is the high level purpose of the product? Who does it serve? What benefit is it intended to bring to them? Answer these questions in a straightforward, factual manner. Avoid going into detail on features – we’ll do that later.

You don’t need to go into depth at this point – what we’re really looking for is a sentence or two that enable us to understand core idea and benefits that would ideally persist, even if the features being tested were absent.

Defining Study Criteria

The crux of running a clean study that elicits clear signal is properly and accurately defining the test parameters. It’s crucial that you thoughtfully define the feature you want to test.

Validated requires two dimensions for feature you’re testing:
1. Description of the feature
2. Explanation of the feature’s importance to your users
When responding to either prompt, please utilize the following general principles:

• Do use concise, simple language: Validated works optimally when your inputs are easy to understand and conceptualize
• Don’t invoke marketing or tech-speak: utilizing garish verbiage obscures the core propositions you’re trying to evaluate
• Do be as objective as possible: pretend like you’re an impartial observer – how would you articulate the feature?
• Don’t use superlatives for the sole sake of flourish: strong descriptors can be useful in emphasizing key concepts, but hyperbole is not
Below is guidance on how to formulate responses for each respective dimensions in a way that will optimize study outcomes.

Defining Features

Describe the feature you’d like to test as concisely as you can. The 75 character limit encourages straightforward definitions that are free of flourish and superlatives. We ask you to expound on virtues and strengths in the next question – this question should stick to objective facts.
Examples
CONCEPT
BAD
GOOD
Savings account
Our interest rates that will knock your socks off!
Interest rates consistently above national average
Smart irrigation
Weather aware sprinklers produce the greenest lawns
Watering times that account for weather forecasts
Tool that digests emails
The next-generation way to consolidate your email communications
AI-filtered digests of email communications
Massage gun
Massage settings that are perfectly dialed to your body’s needs
Pressure and heat that detects and adjusts to muscle tension
Marketplace for virtual services
Gain customers for your services at the touch of a button
Marketplace for advertising, scheduling and paying for virtual services

Defining Importance to Users

For each feature or value proposition you want to test, explain how it brings value to its users. This is a good opportunity to call out competitive advantages, unique benefits, or anything else that helps set the concept being tested apart. However, It’s important to remain factual and objective – avoid marketing and business-speak or any coded language that may be challenging to interpret.
CONCEPT
BAD
GOOD
High savings rate
Your money is 100% safe while gaining on the highest savings rate found anywhere
Deposits are insured and investments historically deliver returns 0.5% above national average
Weather-aware watering timer
The greenest sprinkler on the market also saves massive amounts of water
Cuts water usage and bills by 10% on average
AI-assisted email digests
Cuts the time spent reading emails to virtually zero
Summarizes the contents of emails into a single digest optimized for relevance and readability
Customized massage routines
Ultimate relaxation from massage settings that are tuned perfectly to your body
Automatically sets temperature and pressure based on detected muscle tension
Online virtual service marketplace
Gets users more exposure and paid faster for virtual services than any marketplace platform
Handles the end-to-end process of virtual service fulfillment; no need for external integrations

Brand Assets

In order to run studies, Validated generates high-quality, optimized creative assets for insertion into ads. We can generate these creative assets based on the information you’ve previously provided, but you can also provide guidance that we’ll adhere to when generating creative assets. This guidance can be in the form of logos, brand kits, or other imagery.
If your study invokes your real business and product names, we’ll adhere as closely as possible to what you upload. If your study requires that we obscure your brand, we’ll instead use the uploaded assets as loose inspiration.
This step is optional: if you don’t upload any assets, we’ll automatically generate high-quality brand assets that are consistent with the information you’ve already provided.