MDMV Metrics-Driven Market Validation
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MDMV

Metrics-Driven Market Validation

The Fastest Way to Know
What to Build and
Who Will Buy It

A proven method to turn innovation into paying customers through data-driven market validation.

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Why MDMV Matters

Taking an innovation to market is not a straight line. Most tools assume the product or customer is already known – which is often not the case.

How MDMV Works

MDMV is a proven ten-step process. The key result is the "value case": the main reason why a customer buys your innovation.

  1. User-centric description: Describe your innovation in a way that is understandable for a lay person (somebody who's not a specialist in your field).
  2. Brainstorm applications and pick an application: Brainstorm ways your tech could be used in a customer context. Choose one of these applications to continue - ideally one where your innovation generates a lot of value.
  3. Brainstorm and pick a customer activity the application disrupts: Develop a list of frequently-executed, valuable business activities (business processes) that your innovation might disrupt (change significantly). Choose one of those, ideally the most valuable one, to continue.
  4. Formulate the value proposition: Describe how your innovation will improve this business activity. Identify the KPIs (metrics) that quantify the improvement of the activity and estimate a typical improvement for a typical case.
  5. Quantify it in a business case: Translate the KPI improvement into a business case. Ideally, you help the customer save money (cost reduction; operational business case), but the improvement could also lead to a higher quality of the process or product (tactical business case, often harder to quantify and to sell) or the improvement could allow the customer to do business in a totally new, much better way (strategic business case, very hard to quantify and to sell).
  6. Identify a suitable organization type (ICP, ideal customer profile): Brainstorm which types of organizations would profit most from the value case you have developed. Pick those that would gain a significant operational benefit first, since they are usually the easiest to convince.
  7. Identify target persona: Identify the persona within the ICP who would profit most from your innovation and who has the budget for a pilot project with you. Brainstorm which people within the chosen organization would profit most from the value case you have developed. The ideal person gains a large benefit because, within their sphere of influence, your innovation can help a lot, and the person has certain purchasing power.
  8. Pick a real organization and person: Use your network and that of your close friends, as well as advisors, to find organizations where you can gain access to the target person relatively easily.
  9. How to prove: Determine what kind of proof you have available that would be most convincing for this persona. Ideally, you have already implemented your innovation successfully in a very similar organization and the responsible person there will confirm this. In the worst case, your innovation is an idea without any scientific proof or proof in the real world. The stronger the proof, the easier it will be to convince the person to have a meeting with you.
  10. Draft a complete outreach message: Typical components are:
    Common ground: why they should read this
    Teaser: how they would benefit from the innovation;
    Proof: how we demonstrate that the promised benefits can be achieved
    Call to Action: next steps
    PS: an additional benefit.

When to Use MDMV

Perfect for These Situations:

  • You have not yet found your ideal customer and want to explore the options.
  • You have an idea about your ideal customers and want to find arguments (KPI improvements and value cases) that will convince them.
  • You want to explore alternatives to your current customer segment.

Benefits of the MDMV Approach

🚀 For Entrepreneurs

  • Direct Relevance: Focuses on solving real market problems, enhancing product-market fit
  • Reduced Market Risk: Customer-validated development mitigates entry risks
  • Early Customer Engagement: Enables meaningful feedback from decision-makers, refining product direction
  • Documented decisions: The process leaves a clear trail

🏢 For Support Organizations

  • Boosts Success Rates: Minimizes risks by focusing on customer-driven validation, increasing startup success
  • Proof of Market Fit: Data-driven validation supports funding and strategic decision-making
  • Financial Sustainability: Customer-funded MVPs reduce dependency on external funding
  • Documented decisions: The process leaves a clear trail

Proven and Trusted

MDMV was developed as an alternative to market validation methods that are known to be either not efficient or not work at all. This new approach is based on recent and peer-reviewed science and has proven to be highly effective.

Currently in its fourth version • Used by two Swiss acceleration programs and several startups and scaleups

What Others Say

“I wish I’d had this much earlier. It would have saved me months - maybe even years - spent chasing the wrong customer segment."

Founder of a startup that finally found its target niche

“I can highly recommend the Cognel MDMV. Especially for startups coming from a research background that are not yet very familiar with the business world, it can be a great help in my opinion: Either to sharpen their own ICP or to gain valuable insights into potential partners.”

Founder of an impact venture

"Even though we already found our target niche, the MDMV helped us better understand the business logic of the customer and how our product can support them."

Environment tech entrepreneur

"We found the Cognel MDMV easy to use, and it came up with some surprising new ideas we never would have thought of ourselves."

Student team working on a live business case

“This is incredible.”

CEO of a scaleup preparing to pivot

“I tried running the MDMV process with ChatGPT, but it didn’t work: it kept losing focus. The MDMV tool stayed on track and helped me narrow the options down to a few really interesting ones.”

Founder of a service company

FAQ

What are the benefits of the MDMV process?
The MDMV process gives structure and evidence to early market exploration. It helps innovators discover who really benefits from their technology — and by how much — before building a product. By translating potential improvements into measurable KPIs and “value cases,” it makes business relevance explicit and comparable across use cases. This reduces guesswork, accelerates learning, and results in better product–market fit. Even without software support, the ten-step process produces a clear trail of hypotheses, assumptions, and validation results — a foundation investors and partners can trust.
What are the benefits of the Cognel MDMV tool?
The Cognel MDMV tool automates much of the manual work and actively supports you in discovering, testing, and documenting your market hypotheses. It helps you:
  • Suggest applications for your technology based on the LLM's understanding of the world.
  • Generate and rank value cases that link your innovation to measurable business outcomes.
  • Suggest industry-relevant KPIs to quantify improvements and express value in your customer’s language.
  • Identify promising industry segments where the value case is strongest and most easily proven.
  • Suggest business cases describing the rationale for a customer to invest in a pilot project.
  • Profile decision-makers and personas within target organizations who would directly benefit from your solution.
  • Draft tailored outreach messages (emails or LinkedIn) that combine value, proof, and a clear call to action.
  • Reduce a multi-week process to a few hours by guiding you through each step interactively — without losing depth or traceability.
In short, the Cognel MDMV tool turns an expert-driven methodology into a guided, data-supported experience that reveals what to build and who will buy it — faster and with greater confidence.
Is the tool different from an LLM? How and why?
The Cognel UX looks a bit like a conversational interface, but the functionality is totally different. In Cognel, the MDMV Guide asks you questions and, based on the answers, provides supportive information that helps you develop your own solution. However, it does not provide "the" solution. The Cognel Guides lead users through questions developed by experts, but you are the owner of the challenge and the process and you remain so.
In which languages is Cognel MDMV available?
English and German.
What is a "value case" in MDMV?
It is the main reason why a customer buys your innovation, stated with the KPIs it improves. We use the term "value case" since value could also be non-financial: The improvement of some impact KPI, for example.
How long does a full MDMV cycle take?
If you do it manually, assume a few weeks. If you're an LLM pro, you can shorten this significantly, but assume a few days at least. With the Cognel tool, it usually takes about 2 hours.
Can we run MDMV without the tool?
Yes. The manual process works, but it is much slower and requires more desk work. And since it's much slower, you will usually not evaluate all the options and hypotheses that Cognel MDMV generates, so you might miss relevant customer segments.
How much does it cost?
The MDMV process itself is open and documented — anyone can apply it. The Cognel MDMV tool builds on that foundation with guided automation, data support, and expert logic. Individual access is priced to stay affordable for startups, while organizations such as accelerators, universities, or innovation agencies can get team or white-label licenses. If you’d like to explore access or pilot options, just get in touch — we’ll match the setup to your use case.
How does MDMV differ from other approaches, like JTBD, Value Proposition Canvas, Design Thinking etc.?
MDMV was developed because the established and well-known methods are customer-centric, i.e., they start with a known customer and then help the user develop the optimal solution for this customer. However, this is not the reality of many tech startups and inventors: They have developed a method or technology and need to find the best possible customers for this technology. And since they often do not understand the industry and the language of all the possible customers, finding the optimal target customer is very difficult.

The MDMV approach makes this guesswork explicit and gives you a method to systematically develop options and check their value before even approaching the customer.

The Cognel MDMV tool pushes this even further by systematically supporting you with hypotheses (benefits, KPIs, value cases, target customers), estimates (KPIs, business cases, competitors), and analyses (market sizes).

Ready to Validate Your Innovation?

Don’t let uncertainty hold back your innovation. Start your MDMV journey today and discover the fastest path to market validation.

Email jan@cognel.ai to book a demo

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