Validation without a functional MVP
Hey guys 🙋♂️
Starting from early 2020, @farzad and I have been pushing ourselves to release and validate our ideas more often. For many ideas, we felt that a demo video or a few screenshots of our WIP was a good starting point to validate our work and collect some decent feedback.
In fact, our very latest project is a tool for hosting those demos 🤯, so that we can quickly whip up a page and start collecting feedback + emails of people who are interested in our work.
Do you guys ever do the same? Or do you ALWAYS build and release a functional MVP before asking for feedback?
Would love to learn about your approach 🕵
I always trick myself about this, hey 😅 I think it's a very common mistake to build instead of doing the hard and confronting thing of directly seeking out disconfirming evidence, in the form of a "No, I just don't think what you're doing is interesting or valuable". It isn't always a mistake though, it's just hard to tell which is which. If in doubt, talk to users. If you're really in doubt, then do both concurrently at least. My current thing is a hardware device for indie hackers, so it's hard to say that the user has had the real experience of the product until it's in their literal hand. But the more time goes on, the more I'm thinking I could just as easily have talked to people without a prototype built.
Haha I think I've done the same quite a bit, and now every time I spend more than a couple of weeks on a project, I become guilty and start questioning myself whether or not I could release a more "minimum" version faster.
It depends. There are two completely different situations I experienced:
With my current project Localazy (https://localazy.com), which is a developer-friendly SaaS for app localization, I spoke to many people before I started building it. And they loved the idea of simple UI, fully automated integration, sharing translations between all apps to translate apps for free, etc. But while they could imagine it, it's something completely different to use it for real and to pay for the idea. And it's completely different to get a validation from other people who you are unable to introduce and explain the idea good enough. Such people need to experience it on their own and MVP is a part of it.
A few years ago, before Android and iOS, we sold template-based J2ME mobile apps (for Nokia, etc.) to local cities. We had nothing except for a few images in our phones. But it was enough, it looked exactly like the final app, they could "see it in action and experience it". We were just switching the images from one to another, but it looked like the real action. Also, we were able to explain them the idea and sell it to them. We only started building the real app once we get 3 sales. As an addition, we planned a lot of features but we learned that nobody was interested in many of them and that we missed important ones. That was great as we didn't spend even a minute on something that we weren't paid for.
In the second situation, we were selling it face-to-face and it's possible to do so without MVP. For indirect online sales, MPV is often the part of the sales process.
And validating the idea is kind of a sales process - if you can sell it to them, the idea is validated :-).
Wow those are both pretty good examples!
Makes sense, it's quite a lot about whether or not the true essence of a product can be "demonstrated" without an MVP.
I'm curious though, do you think the fact that people interested in your idea would leave you with their email addresses is also a smaller — but still valid — form of validation as it gets you one more step closer to closing your sale?
Sure, it's a validation that the idea is somehow interesting to them. However, I would engage them in a deeper discussion to be sure that they understand it and possibly collect some feedback.
However, it really depends on many factors such as the target audience. I can imagine that there are valid cases where email may be good enough as a validation. Imagine, for example, a service that sends out discount coupons via email and earn money from advertisers. Collecting end-users' emails may be considered to be a validation that the service is interesting for them. However, it's definitely not a validation that such a service is attractive for advertisers.
I think that you're on to something good here.
We actually ended up spending a lot of time and money building our MVP to be "perfect" since we were so scared that people wouldn't take us seriously, or not come back if it wasn't of high enough standard.
In hindsight, we were wrong in most of our assumptions on how to platform would be used and what features was important - so we've had to spend more time and money on changing that. For our next product, we would definitely be keen to create a demo and collect feedback before building the actual product.
I hope this mini project of ours become good enough by then to host the demo of your next product!
Just had a look at VReel out of curiosity. I'm sure you guys have gone through many iterations but it looks pretty solid now 💪
Me too, excited to try it out :)
Thank you so much for your kind words about VReel!
We built an MVP* that was a mistake. You should even do pre-sales if you can!
I think that'd be lovely, but don't you think unless you have a promising audience or a really special idea, pre-sales are pretty tough for most products?
Really interesting product! Have you guys ever thought of running a smoke test when validating your ideas?
It worked pretty well so far for us!!
Smoke Test: https://medium.com/tradecraft-traction/a-growth-marketers-guide-to-smoke-tests-6ffa964a6181
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That's a pretty interesting way of differentiating. I guess we have done a mishmash of both without having a fixed framework so far.
Are there situations where you'd skip validating the concept and jump straight into validating the product?
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