Validating a product in 3 weeks

War Stories from a strategic design firm

The founders of a company (let’s say X) came to us requesting our expertise for the strategy of a product intended to “disrupt LinkedIn.” The product was in its very early stages, and the founders had invested about $50,000 of personal funding to recruit an engineering team and develop the MVP.

That said, we realized that the founders were concerned about the risk, because they were not sure if their product was solving the correct problem. So, we had to find a way to rapidly validate the various ideas because company X was spending significant amounts of money on engineering every week.

The Solution: Run a set of experiments that would help the founders rapidly test and validate multiple value propositions.

People think, say and do different things. The best way to validate a product is to focus on how people behave under real world constraints. Therefore, we designed an experiment that involved the respondent giving us something they valued (their email address) in exchange for signing up for the beta version of a product.

We published the link in multiple forums on social media (LinkedIn groups, Google groups, etc.) where we knew respondents with our target demographic would frequent.

The experiment took about 2 weeks and about $50 to run. Based on the number of signups for each value proposition, we were able to help the client decide on their next course of action.

Things to consider: Good Experimental design will help you avoid biases and reach the correct conclusions. We recommend having a trained researcher and designer to help you ideate, design the experiment, mock up screens, and analyze the data.

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