Thanks to Paul Graham (YCombinator Founder who’s written fantastic essays), Lean Startup, and others, you’ve probably been exposed to the concepts of “minimum viable products,” “customer development,” and rapid prototyping.
In a perfect world, we would be absolutely sure that folks actually want (and will pay for) the thing that we’re building before we actually build it.
So, how do we get as sure as possible? How do we get solid qualitative and quantitative feedback? Opinions, feelings, visitor stats, conversion stats, pricing stats, etc?
Here are some useful techniques:
- Talk to would-be customers in-person and over the phone and ask them about the space that you’re interested in. What services or tools are they using? What do they like / not like?
- Create rough wireframes in Balsamiq Mockups. Later, create high-fidelity wireframes in Photoshop (you’ll need to hire a Web/Mobile Designer for this).
- Show those wireframes to a handful of would-be users (in the style of Coffee Shop or Hallway Usability Testing). Print them out or stitch them together using InVision, Flinto, or a similar tool.
- Create Product Landing Pages that describe what the product is and how it works, as if the product actually exists. Can be done quickly with a Themeforest Template, Weebly (web site creator), or UnBounce (landing page creator with analytics). Check out how we did it here.
- Bring traffic to the landing page. Buy ads on Google, Facebook, and Reddit. Track how many folks visit the page. How many click on the call-to-action (“Sign up Now”), how many provide their email address, etc.
- Once you have enough email addresses, send a survey (we recommend SurveyMonkey) asking some questions about what they might want, how much they’d be willing to pay, how likely they are to buy, etc.