Taking six months out of my enterprise job to build a tool for validating ideas
Hi IndieHackers,
I’ve been making software products for several years (worked as a designer, developer and scrum master). Over the years I’ve seen the same failures repeated in planning and building products, across different sized companies.
My product teams spent a long time debating over pain points and feature ideas, without enough customer validation, which often led to disappointing outcomes. After speaking to several friends in the industry I realized they were having the same issues.
In response to this, I’m taking some time out of my job and working on a way to gather feature ideas, then survey users, customers and prospects using best-practise prioritization questions.
I’ve put together a landing page, and I’d appreciate your feedback!
— In what situations would you use this solution?
— How much would you expect to pay for this solution?
— What would you stop using if you used this solution?
— Any other feedback, thoughts, or stories you have.
Also, if folks are interested, I’m happy to share my progress back with the IndieHackers community as I build this out.
Thanks!
Hey, Jimies!
Wonderful idea, however, I feel necessary to suggest you changing questions (both here and inside your actual product) to questions about facts and previous experience.
People are generally very, very bad in future predictions.
And when you ask "would you love this feature?" / "how much would you pay?", they often answer what they'd like you to hear, not facts. Because there is a difference between answering "yeah, it's totally cool" and paying you money. :)
It seems like a better idea to ask about real facts and find an audience that has a strong need for your product. Try to find people who may have a use case or (better) already done the job that your product solves and conduct an interview with them.
Rob Fitzpatrick has written a very famous "Mom's Test" about customer development - you might like for both your research and your product.
Hope that makes sense, have a nice day!
Hey ivanovandrewx thanks so much for this thoughtful comment. Not sure how I missed it so sorry for the delay in response!
I'm a big fan of Rob Fitzpatrick and the Mom Test, I use it myself. Totally get what you mean about asking "would you use this", which is a pretty unreliable and hard to answer question. Thanks for pointing this out.
The methods that I'm testing with Deffo are currently The Kano Model, and an Importance / Satisfaction Matrix.
The Importance / Satisfaction Matrix asks customers to rate their current needs, so is more in line with your comment.
The Kano Model, on the other hand, asks a dysfunctional and functional set of questions, relating to potential feature ideas. "How do you feel if you have this?" "How do you feel if you do not have this" (notice it doesn't use a conditional tense, though it is still hypothetical of course), and can also be supplemented by images or static prototypes. The Kano Model method is more appropriate to apply once you've already validated user needs, and are speaking to a customer that is familiar with what your product does, or might do. Here's a good article on Kano: https://www.productplan.com/glossary/kano-model/
Have you come across either of these approaches before?
Thanks again for your comment!
Hey, Jimies!
Yeah, I find Kano Model very useful, and I'm really excited to see folks proactively using different product management frameworks in their indie products :)
Keep up going with Deffo, wish you best!