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Testing An Idea With Early Users

Most of the SaaS founders understand the value of user testing to validate an idea or MVP. Yet I've seen a lot of them (at least 70%) don't do it with the right set of tools and just 10% end up getting any meaningful result out of it.

Here I've listed down some some inhibitions and biases that stop most people from testing their idea/MVP with the right audience in the right manner.

1. Projection Bias

If you go grocery shopping on an empty stomach, you tend to buy more food than is needed, and you may also end up buying unnecessary food to satiate the hunger that may not be even there in future.

In a similar manner, when we start our idea validation, if we get a few negative feedbacks at the beginning we take it as a general feedback and stop researching further.

2. Confirmation Bias

This is just opposite to the first bias. As entrepreneurs we are always inclined to believe that the idea or product we are building has great utility. And sometimes we frame our survey as "will you be interested in a product that will do X, Y and Z for you?"

When we go to our potential users with this leading question, most of them will answer 'yes' and the chances are 90% of them are not telling us the truth.

Sometimes, we only seek confirming rather than disconfirming evidence in support of our idea which eventually results in a product with no takers.

The best approach would be to ask a question about a user's problems and how they solve it currently than asking about their confirmation for a given solution.

3. Social Anxiety

Sometimes we hesitate to get our plan out in the public for the fear of being judged.

Social media can sometimes be toxic and lot of people use it to spread negativity.

In such situations, we often try to be very cautious while asking for a public feedback, and instead just reach out to people whom we know or with whom we are somehow connected even though they might not be part of our target market.

4. Getting Distracted By Shining Objects

It happens that when we are building something or working on an idea, we suddenly come across a product or idea that's very close to the one we are building. They become so prominent or emotionally striking, that we start feeling inferior about our own product.

My personal belief is to not look at competitors while building something as we are bound to get influenced by them at a subconscious level. The focus of our ideas should be our users and not competitors.

Yet when we come across something (even accidentally), it becomes so difficult to just ignore them and move on.

5. Interpretation Bias

Many of us have the tendency to interpret ambiguous situations as negative and/or threatening. This is more prevalent in perfectionists or entrepreneurs who wanted their products to be X times better than the existing alternatives.

Under such scenarios, if we get ambiguous results from the target audience, we tend to believe that the idea is subpar. But in reality the reason could be that we are not testing with the right audience or the audience is unable to understand the idea.

6. Selective Perception

This happens when expectations start affecting our perceptions.

Sometimes a comment or opinion gets into our head and we are so obsessed about it that we don't think about all other ideas or opinions that we have gathered. Eventually it leads us to make a wrong choice.

An example can be when a person responds to a product survey and says, "I was looking exactly for something like this but only if it had feature X". This shouldn't divert our attention from existing product's benefits to feature X.

###7. Subjective Validation

In such scenarios, we consider an information to be correct if it has any personal meaning or significance for us.

It happens during secondary research when we are studying comments and opinions from people from our industry. We tend to pick up selective answers and build a narrative that confirms our own perception.

If we have built an app to scrape data from social media and some people are asking for tools to scrape X data from social media, we tend to believe our app would be in demand. But in reality, we should get into a deeper understanding of their problem and see if this is something they need, and if they'll be willing to pay for it.

I'd like to know the views from this group on what you think about these inhibitions/biases and if there are more that I didn't cover.

  1. 1

    Very comprehensive perspective and it's really helpful for people who need to know the hard truth about validation @InfluRocket - nice post!

    1. 1

      Thanks! It really baffles me to see so many great products not finding much traction among users. I was studying successful products from Product Hunt and how they did after a year and it was surprising to find that many products have little traction after a year, even though they were "product of the week". When I delved deeper into it, I found a list of biases or shortcuts people take at the most crucial phase of problem validation.

      1. 1

        That’s very interesting tho. How would you suggest these product of the week companies leverage their presence to grow further?

  2. 1

    I can relate to several of these from my own past experience. I guess this is just a human tendency.

    1. 1

      No doubt it affects all of us as humans. But there are ways to get around these prejudices and we must look at data as objectively as possible.

  3. 1

    What are the rights tools to test an idea and how much testing is good enough to get the right results?

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