Founders! Test your idea without spending a penny.
As a startup founder myself, I know how we are always in a rush to fail-fast, fail-early but unfortunately we have got only few attempts :(. Won’t you like to sharpen those few attempts and increase your chance of success? That too without spending a dollar! Sounds amazing. Isn’t it?
Actually executing it, is even more amazing and satisfying!
“Does it better” will always beat “did it first.” — @Aaron Levie, CEO at Box (Click to tweet)
How do you find right user to test
- Find common pattern in your target segment and use them to spot your users. For example: like where do they go most — Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, anywhere else?
- Reach out to one of your near competitor audience. Find people on social media who are using a similar products. They would be a good judge of your product. This would be great to validate the experience of your current website/app. But, honestly this does not work if you don’t want your users to have any pre-conceived notions.
- Find users who follow your competitor on Twitter. The best way to figure out who your competitors are — Alexa. It gives you a list of ventures near your product. It’s always great to learn from those who have pioneered the domain.
- Run campaigns on Facebook and find users who come from same geography and age-range. Promoting a campaign on Facebook gives you the option of setting the category of audience you want to target.
- No! Your mom is NOT a right test user.. :-)
Where to find test users
- Facebook Groups: There are multiple Fb groups where users are discussing their problems in particular space. These are always looking new solutions and give feedback there. You can find such groups and engage users by asking questions. These are open to find and you’ll land in the right group by few searches.
< Bonus tip: Fb groups are more active on Weekend/break times.>
- Linkedin groups: These are more formal study oriented groups. You can use them to validate the ideas itself. It’s a very professional forum and you’ll find folks involved actively in serious discussion.
< Bonus tip: Linkedin groups are more active during office-hours/weekdays.>
- Twitter: Do you have a competitor product? Great! Go to their Twitter handles and see who has been interacting with them. Use that conversation to pitch your products. Sounds evil? But no harm in learning :) and then improving on that.
< Bonus Tip: Best engagement on Twitter is between morning, meeting breaks, lunch-time and commute time.>
- Quora: Quora has suddenly become most popular platform for asking questions. You can search for relevant questions to pitch your idea and see how users respond to it or ask a question to start a new thread. More engaged you are; better response you’ll get.
- Beta user group: If you already have an app and early adoption, you can also go for giving away some discount to these users in exchange for feedback on your new idea. This also gets your early users more connected to the idea or product and they actively start contributing to it.
- Slack groups: Slack groups are fastest growing e-hangout for users. In a span of 2–3 years, there is Slack group for everything- Art, sports, Travel, shopping, job, you name it. There’s a Slack group for NBA fans with 1-million users.. :)
Most of these Slack groups are free and some of them charge free when you can become admin and post about your idea to take feedback from community.
<Bonus tip: don’t try to be promotional but engage with community. Take out some time to genuinely respond to other queries too.>
What to do when you get your users
Once you have basic responses from customers, you can get your users to a quick Skype/Google hangout call.
Get basic understanding : Ask open ended question — about how does their usual day looks like? How do they try to do a particular task? Observe if they mention point you are trying to solve or not.
Try to know more about the problem before start validating the solution. You never know when something interesting comes out of generic discussion.
Propose your solution: Once you have understood enough about your user and problem. You can start pitching your solution.
You can do that by giving control of the application or prototype to users and ask them to complete the task — complete the onboarding, make the payment, find an item and add it to basket/itinerary.
Don’t guide user to complete the task or rather, ask them how do they expect to complete the task.
Record and observe what users do: One of the big challenge during these validation is that users don’t necessarily do what they say.
To get this around, it’s important to observe what they do rather than just asking questions. I’m listing down few solutions which will help you record user’s behavior and observe them to validate your ideas.
- Usability labs- Very expensive. Time taking. Users have be physically present. Usually not recommended for startups.
- Screen recording software + Skype/Hangout: Bingo combination if you are trying to record video and observe them.
- CanvasFlip Magic URL: With CanvasFlip, you can not only record videos of your users but see a heatmap and conversion funnel for really quick decision without much of external help.. :)
<Bonus Tip: You can share Magic URL on Social media, Slack group or email via emails and start recording user videos. No logging in or app/plugin download required.
Finally,
Testing your idea early in the process is important because cost of iteration is higher at the later stage. Also, validating early brings credibility in front of investors, customers, team & within.
And now that you know how you can test your idea without digging a hole in your pocket — go ahead and test the hell out of it. Free!!
