Ask HN: How do you quickly test out new product/app ideas? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you quickly test out new product/app ideas?

52 pointsrkh201815 comments

From a technical perspective, how do you validate a new product/app idea? What tools/frameworks/etc. do you use to collect enough information to know if you should invest more time and money?

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1. Landing page that shows mockups of your product and how it benefits the audience - capture emails "get notified of launch!"

You can drive traffic to the landing page by sharing it in relevant communities and by setting up some highly targeted ads.

2. Instead of programming your core feature right away, even as a MVP, if possible, do manual non-scaleable work to offer it instead. This lets you test if people want it, without spending much dev time or money.

Example: "Leading into the summer of 2009, the team developed the first incarnation of FanDuel in a Google Docs spreadsheet, says cofounder and chief product officer Tom Griffiths, who recalls recruiting test players on Craigslist and accepting their entry fees via PayPal"

I've heard technique 2 described as a "Wizard of Oz" experience.

I worked on a Hackathon project that received an award from the sponsor and seemed like a good idea. My team of 4 was stoked and ready to continue building the service but one more experienced dev was hesitant.

He advocated putting up a beta sign up page with some mock images; to wait and see if we were going to get traction.

Sure enough, he was right. We got tweeted by Etsy and expected a rush of sign ups- we only got 1. It was from a guy I met at the airport whom I told about the project.

One great way is to focus on personal problems (instead of "ideas"). Solve it in a very hacky way for yourself and then share it with people, see if it helps others. If it doesn't, no big deal, you've solved an annoying problem for yourself without investing too much time. If others like it, then you can see if you want to take it to the next level. Most first-time founders started that way.

Interesting essay on this subject: http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

I think it helps to list out the core value of your idea and the easiest way you can test out that it actually brings value to your end-user/customer. Alongside of that, you should have assumptions/hypothesis surrounding your idea that can be tested/validated out in the cheapest, quickest way that brings measurable results.

Buffer Box is a great example of a startup that tested out their idea cheaply and quickly: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/bytes/e/part-1-the-bufferbo...

TLDR; BufferBox was one of the first "Amazon Locker"-services. The problem they solved was "missed deliveries". So they tested (cheaply, quickly and easily) their concept by posting posters everywhere on their college campus promoting a way for people to not miss their deliveries (students always missed deliveries due to classes and this was before the days of Amazon where they just dropped packages in your front door). Students signed up would put in Buffer Box's address and would get their items/products/packages delivered from a team member of Buffer Box. This helped Buffer Box validate there was a need for their service, and that their product ("Buffer Box") would be needed.

I would like to know also. I have had one moderately successful product and I am not even sure why it was when others were not. I did put the most amount of effort into it. But since it was a somewhat early app I made out well in the app gold rush period. I have found that "If you build it, they won't come". One thing I have found in the software world is that great amounts of effort is put into features and areas which few people should care about when other great needs are unmet. Why did Apple spend so much time with a feces emoji when we don't have a machine based closed caption service for the hearing impaired yet?

What I would like to see is a website where the public itself develops a product or refines an idea so that a market is already in place before engineering begins. I would love to see someone do this with the Linux desktop. There are zillions of Linux desktops and great effort is put in areas where users wonder "what were they thinking?? We were happy with the way it was!! Why did you change it? Why didn't you put in this feature we all miss from Windows 7 or Mac OS?".

The market should already exist for most products. For the iPhone, the market was feature phone users who played Java apps. For a social media app, people should already have created these social groups elsewhere, and those groups would be straining from the poor technology. For SaaS, someone should already have hacked a solution together.

Personally I say figure out your initial market and even your marketing approach before you write any code at all. Get buyers lined up for the product before you build it, preferably with cash on hand, ready to pay you.

Validating a business model also means taking on tons of technical debt. Build your app with PowerPoint or Wix if you have to, just to prove the concept. Don't build the app too much until you have something people are willing to pay for. You'd be surprised how many SaaS are badly built at launch, including Stripe.

Two things:

1. Smoke tests Set up a landing page, buy traffic and see how good it would convert. You can improve on the copy a little bit (value proposition) but you can extrapolate the interest. Also take Google Trends into account.

2. Directly talk to potential customers. "You don't need a product to sell a product".

Build a simple functional prototype (also known as Minimum viable product) and give it away free.

This will start a whole series of next level tasks and some of them you may not even be aware of with just an idea.

Track usage and interest in your prototype and decide whether it is worth building the full product.

"Give it away free" is one thing that most of the times gives false results.

I completely agree with this. If a product is meant to be free then give it away if you intend on charging some day you need top get people to pay from the start. Even if its a small amount.

Also if users will pay for a buggy prototype then it is clearly something they really want.

Quick, out of the box solutions with PaaS or BaaS help. I have used Angular with Firebase effectively. It cuts down time for development.

But remember to refactor once your app gains ground.

one thing i’ve heard people doing is making a quick splash page and using it to measure possible attention. You can collect emails with it or simply just monitor traffic.

I would like to know too.

OP here. Thanks for all your replies. They're really helpful! I'll go through them and reply if necessary.

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