{"id":16706,"date":"2019-06-25T13:19:10","date_gmt":"2019-06-25T13:19:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/productcollective.com\/?p=16706"},"modified":"2019-06-25T13:20:27","modified_gmt":"2019-06-25T13:20:27","slug":"testing-mvps-customers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/productcollective.com\/testing-mvps-customers\/","title":{"rendered":"Testing MVPs With Your Customers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You can keep your MVP focused on a specific problem and deliver it quickly. But you must take the time to learn from your customer\u2019s reactions and iterate on that information. This week\u2019s resources give you ways you can test your assumptions to make sure you\u2019re building something people want, and not just merely going through the motions.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Testing pricing and willingness to pay in the easiest possible way.<\/strong>\u00a0Cory Zue created an MVP of his printable place card maker and tested it with Google Ads in order to try and kill his dream of creating a profitable product as fast as possible. Cory wanted to find out if he could get people to give him their email address to use his product. Based on the 20% of people who gave him their email address, his test was a success, sort of. He knew his site was worth an email address, but he didn\u2019t know if it was worth actual dollars. Cory followed up his initial test with another one approached with the philosophy of trying to do as little work as possible to kill the dream as quickly as possible.\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/hackernoon.com\/mvp-pricing-80ebad5414fe\">Here\u2019s Cory\u2019s description of the process and what he learned from the results so far.<\/a>\u00a0 (via\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/czue\">@czue<\/a>)<\/p>\n<p><strong>What we learned by testing our MVP on Medium.<\/strong>\u00a0Paul Graham advises that you should \u201cMake something people want.\u201d Great advice, but how exactly can you do that. A minimum viable\u00a0<strong><em>product<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0can help you determine what people want, but sometimes you want to figure that out with as little work as possible, which often means not actually building a product. Mithun Madhusudan suggests that you should think of \u201can MVP as a hypothesis that you need to test and validate with a degree of statistical significance.\u201d Which can be accomplished with zero lines of code. \u00a0To give you an idea of how to do that, Mithun shared the story of\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/medium.com\/the-startup-magazine-collection\/what-we-learnt-by-testing-our-mvp-on-medium-4f1384d9b0c\">how his team tried to validate his product Cubeit and what they learned.<\/a>(via\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/mythun\">@mythun<\/a>)<\/p>\n<p><strong>MVP Testing\u200a\u2014\u200ahow to drive traffic to your website.\u00a0<\/strong>Eze Vidra and Jalin Somaiya\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/medium.com\/vc-cafe\/mvp-testing-how-to-drive-traffic-to-your-website-c52e85da7db0\">gave a presentation to a group of 20 entrepreneurs at Launchpad about MVP Testing<\/a>. \u00a0They wanted to help early stage startups focus on their most immediate goal and optimize for it through testing and iteration, while leveraging the basics of online marketing. They wanted to encourage startups to spend some time working with an MVP so that they can check their customer\u2019s reaction and demand and avoid building features no one wants. The\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.slideshare.net\/ediggs\/driving-traffic-to-your-website-vc-cafe\">presentation<\/a>\u00a0is self explanatory and compliments the Lean Startup methodology and customer development\u200a which encourage you to validate, test and iterate.\u00a0 (via\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/ediggs\">@ediggs<\/a>)<\/p>\n<p><strong>The art of MVP testing.<\/strong>\u00a0Quotes such as \u201cDone is better than perfect; Don\u2019t worry be crappy;\u201d and \u201cFail fast and fail often\u201d are good in sentiment, but can lead to undesirable results if taken too literally. You want a speedy build-measure-learn cycle, but you don\u2019t want to produce something so crappy that you can\u2019t learn anything from it. Jan Jones suggests that even if you practice automated testing religiously,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/blog.oozou.com\/the-art-of-mvp-testing-6bbe42571b8e\">you should still go through your product firsthand and check each feature to make sure it works<\/a>.\u00a0 (via\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/dynjo\">@dynjo<\/a>)<\/p>\n<p><strong>Riskiest Assumption Testing.\u00a0<\/strong>Some teams rely on hope when introducing a new product &#8211; as in \u201cI hope people buy this!\u201d Other teams have found the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to be a helpful starting point. Thomas Nagels would tell you that the MVP \u201cmay not be the best tool for selecting a starting point for your innovation.\u201d He has found that t<a href=\"https:\/\/medium.com\/@thomas_nagels\/riskiest-assumption-testing-1464d98cdd47\">he Riskiest Assumption Test (RAT) may be a better alternative for making product decisions<\/a>. The RAT is \u201cthe process of finding the riskiest assumptions in your (business) model and validating them. High risk assumptions have two traits: a high probability of being wrong and significant impact when they are.\u201d (via\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/thomas_nagels\">@thomas_nagels<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You can keep your MVP focused on a specific problem and deliver it quickly. But you must take the time to learn from your customer\u2019s reactions and iterate on that information. This week\u2019s resources give you ways you can test your assumptions to make sure you\u2019re building something people want, and not just merely going [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":16707,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[340],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Testing MVPs With Your Customers - Product Collective | Organizers of INDUSTRY: The Product Conference<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/productcollective.com\/testing-mvps-customers\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Testing MVPs With Your Customers - Product Collective | Organizers of INDUSTRY: The Product Conference\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"You can keep your MVP focused on a specific problem and deliver it quickly. But you must take the time to learn from your customer\u2019s reactions and iterate on that information. This week\u2019s resources give you ways you can test your assumptions to make sure you\u2019re building something people want, and not just merely going [&hellip;]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/productcollective.com\/testing-mvps-customers\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Product Collective | Organizers of INDUSTRY: The Product Conference\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/productcollective\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2019-06-25T13:19:10+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2019-06-25T13:20:27+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/productcollective.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/a27b62fd-31f6-437e-9bce-d3620ffc9081.gif\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"500\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"357\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/gif\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Kent J McDonald\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Kent J McDonald\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/productcollective.com\/testing-mvps-customers\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/productcollective.com\/testing-mvps-customers\/\",\"name\":\"Testing MVPs With Your Customers - Product Collective | Organizers of INDUSTRY: The Product Conference\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/productcollective.com\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/productcollective.com\/testing-mvps-customers\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/productcollective.com\/testing-mvps-customers\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/productcollective.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/a27b62fd-31f6-437e-9bce-d3620ffc9081.gif\",\"datePublished\":\"2019-06-25T13:19:10+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2019-06-25T13:20:27+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/productcollective.com\/#\/schema\/person\/1d2a0862706dd25cb859df898421cfc9\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/productcollective.com\/testing-mvps-customers\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/productcollective.com\/testing-mvps-customers\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/productcollective.com\/testing-mvps-customers\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/productcollective.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/a27b62fd-31f6-437e-9bce-d3620ffc9081.gif\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/productcollective.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/a27b62fd-31f6-437e-9bce-d3620ffc9081.gif\",\"width\":500,\"height\":357},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/productcollective.com\/testing-mvps-customers\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/productcollective.com\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Testing MVPs With Your Customers\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/productcollective.com\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/productcollective.com\/\",\"name\":\"Product Collective | Organizers of INDUSTRY: The Product Conference\",\"description\":\"For people who build, launch and scale world-class software products.\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/productcollective.com\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/productcollective.com\/#\/schema\/person\/1d2a0862706dd25cb859df898421cfc9\",\"name\":\"Kent J McDonald\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/productcollective.com\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/f05af3c4d932a4dd567e445ee0e47cc9?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/f05af3c4d932a4dd567e445ee0e47cc9?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"Kent J McDonald\"},\"description\":\"Kent J McDonald writes about and practices software product management. He has product development experience in a variety of industries including financial services, health insurance, nonprofit, and automotive. Kent practices his craft with a variety of product teams and provides just in time resources for product people at KBP.media and Product Collective. 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