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Mobile App Validation and Business Insights

Entering a niche already occupied by Intol, Allergy Eats, Food Intolerances, and Yuka, Food Filter's founder envisioned it as a competitor to well-known food trackers like MyFitnessPal and Lose It!. To secure a place in the market, the team needed to find an untouched niche—a problem not addressed by existing products. They devised a 3-step validation strategy, combining research and tests to gain deep insights into current market needs.

Here're the steps of the Food Filter product idea validation, that you can discover, or try on your own startup.

Stage 1

The initial validation step gives us a quick market overview. To validate the idea, we conducted market research, analyzing competitors' features, user reviews, and ratings. We utilized the Mobile App Rating Scale to assess the functionality of existing food allergy apps. Existing apps had limited functionality in proposing or filtering recipes based on specific food allergies. There was only one startup collaborating with restaurants to make recipes transparent for those worried about accidentally consuming allergens on dates. Competitors' positive metrics, revenue, and raised funds indicated potential demand. Unfortunately, this method provides about 20% accuracy in startup success probability, so we progressed to the next stage.

Stage 2

Convinced of market demand, we conducted user interviews and surveys to understand the needs of individuals with food allergies. People with food allergies struggle to find products on shelves without forbidden ingredients. Moms, in particular, found shopping a nightmare due to various limitations for their family members. An interesting insight was Moms' desire to find allergen substitutes to feed children tasty, varied, and balanced foods without causing allergies. Reading product labels was challenging due to small text, foreign language, or unfamiliar ingredient names. In-depth customer interviews gave us valuable information:

• We identified target audience segments: individuals with food allergies, those with slight food intolerances seeking quality food, families following various diets (e.g., vegan), moms searching for allergen-free alternatives, athletes, and business people with allergies who often eat in unfamiliar places.
• We discovered and stated key pain points mentioned frequently enough to consider them as trends.
• We identified problems not solved in the current market, establishing them as core values of our product. However, accuracy was still insufficient (less than 60%) in startup success probability.