How to test your hypotheses before the MVP
Maximize customer learnings and verify core business assumptions without spending significant time or money.
Why am I writing this?
I frequently meet with entrepreneurs who want to know whether their idea is worth pursuing.
The best way to answer this question is to validate or (more often than not) invalidate your businesses’s core hypotheses and assumptions.
Once you get to the “ground-truth” you can make an informed decision as to whether to stay the course, iterate, pivot, or abandon.
As a first step in this validation process, many entrepreneurs jump straight to building an MVP.
Building out an MVP is costly and time-consuming.
At this early stage, your company’s lifeblood is customer learnings. Don’t bleed out!
There are almost always ways to test your core hypotheses without having to build an MVP.
This piece focuses on the different methods to do this that have been effectively employed.
The ultimate intention of this piece is to increase the odds of success for myself and other entrepreneurs.
Pre-MVP experimentation => Faster learning => Earlier convergence on a product that customers want.
How to test your hypotheses before the MVP?
Customer interviews
Talking to customers is critical to understanding whether they actually want your product.
I highly recommend The Mom Test.
Learn how to extract useful insights from customer interviews instead of “leading the witness”.
Actions speak louder than words.
Asking hypothetical questions like “Would you use this product?” or “Would you pay for this?” leads to biased answers, as the customer says what they think you want to hear.
Instead, ask “What did you do the last time you experienced this problem?”.
If the customer has already stitched together a home-grown, hacky solution to the problem, you are in good shape.
Landing page
Website explaining the problem and how your solution uniquely solves the problem.
Include a waitlist or sign-up form to gauge customer interest.
Robinhood used the simple landing page below to get an initial waitlist of nearly 1M users!
If you’re selling physical goods (e.g. eCommerce), you can use a landing page to accept pre-orders and secure the funding needed to purchase your first batch of inventory.
Promo video
Use a promo video in conjunction with a landing page.
Promo videos can add a personal touch and capture the customer’s attention.
They are also easily shared in forums, blogs, group chats, etc., which you can leverage to drive traffic to your website and increase waitlist signups.
Dropbox’s first promo video is a great example of a simple yet powerful promo video illustrating Dropbox’ value prop.
Figma wireframes
First, mock-up some wireframes in Figma.
Once you’ve finished, you can connect your wireframes to encode user interaction e.g. clicking this button on Screen A opens Screen B.
Within Figma, you can run a virtual phone or virtual desktop so your customers can step through your whole UX themselves.
Watching the user interact with your UX in realtime is useful for identifying areas of confusion and counter-intuitive usage patterns.
Note: not a single line of code has been written!
Pre-recorded demo
Customers see the product in action and visualize themselves using it.
If you want to code up your demo, hardcode as much as possible.
For API-based solutions you should definitely hard code API responses.
Then, in a Jupyter Notebook, record yourself making calls to the API and receiving responses (nobody needs to know that these responses were pre-determined).
“Consulting” version of your product.
Often involves a heavy amount of manual work behind the scenes.
E.g. User submits information on frontend and backend work is done almost entirely manually.
Do things that don’t scale.
Paul Graham’s seminal Do Things That Don’t Scale was a paradigm shift for entrepreneurs.
Tedious and unscalable tasks that were once perceived as undesirable are now viewed as invaluable learning experiences.
BE CAREFUL.
Make sure that it is technically possible to automate your manual approach. Otherwise you are dooming yourself to manual work for the foreseeable future of your company.
Start a newsletter
If your idea is content-heavy, consider starting a newsletter to gauge initial interest in the content.
It’s essential to have a close personal connection with your first subscribers, as they will hopefully become a community of early evangelists for your product that provide invaluable feedback for the lifetime of your company.
Product Hunt initially began as an email list surfacing the latest and greatest products in technology. Through the newsletter, the founders were able to figure out the exact format and content that users were most interested in before even launching a website.
Start a Slack channel or Discord server
If your idea is related to community or involves communication between different stakeholders, consider starting a Slack channel or Discord server.
From here, you’ll be able to observe common interactions between user archetypes, which seamlessly develop into the spec for your MVP.
Similar to the newsletter, your early evangelists will likely come from this community so it’s important to have a close personal connection with each member.
Look no further than Bored Ape Yacht Club, which started out as Discord server where members discussed and traded ape NFTs.
Today, Yuga Labs (the holding company of BAYC) is valued at $4B and has acquired the IP of several other prominent NFT companies including CryptoPunks and Meebits.
Run “fake” ads
If your target customers are frequent users Facebook, IG, Google, TikTok, etc., you can run small ad campaigns (for <$100) and assess whether your product captures their attention and purchasing intent.
Given the comprehensive analytics that come with these platforms, you can make data driven decisions as to whether your product resonates with your target users e.g. impressions, click through rate, number of waitlist sign-ups that came from the campaign, etc.
A more organic version of this strategy would be sharing a link to your landing page within forums, threads, and blogs that your users actively participate in.
Just be careful not to be flagged as a spammer or a bot!
Conclusion
Leverage these techniques to test your hypotheses before spending any time and money on the MVP.
There are myriad ways to test your hypotheses before the MVP - you’re only limited by your imagination and scrappiness.
If there are methods not listed above, please let me know and I’ll update the list!
Let’s not forget hardware.
Many of the techniques above are more oriented towards software.
Having said this, I’d love to augment this list or create an entirely separate one for hardware products.
If you have experience in the hardware realm, I’d love to chat!