7 New Ways to Test Your Minimum Viable Product

If you first heard about “lean methodology” in 2011, when serial entrepreneur Eric Ries coined the term, you probably thought it referred to Jenny Craig or the Paleo diet, not a set of principles for keeping costs low and delivering products as quickly as possible.

Now, of course, thousands of startups, as well as many big businesses, are “lean” (or at least, they claim to be.)

But even if you’re constantly iterating and innovating, don’t forget the most crucial component of the process: testing your MVP.

Here are seven new ways to see whether your product will resonate with the market.

1. Wizard of Oz

This test involves a little bit of trickery. Your customers or users believe they’re experiencing the true product, but you’re doing all the behind-the-scenes work manually.

Not only can you see whether you’ve got a desirable good or service before you actually build it, but you can also identify the pain points of that good or service.

Jason Boehmig, co-founder of Ironclad, relied on this strategy when developing the company’s eponymous software. Ironclad is an automated legal assistant, helping companies get paperwork and contracts completed much more efficiently. In the beginning, however, there was no technology; Boehmig, a former lawyer, was finding documents, requesting signatures, and filling out everything by hand.

He said this exercise showed him exactly what Ironclad’s software needed to do. Plus, the excitement of the original customers proved that Ironclad filled a real need.

2. Fake Door

If you’ve already got a customer base, using the fake door test is a fantastic way to gauge whether they’ll be interested in a new product or feature.

That’s what online marketplace CustomMade did. The team was thinking about introducing the option to save other users’ projects for inspiration. Instead of developing the functionality and then seeing if it was popular, they simply added the “Save” button. Just the button—there still wasn’t a save feature.

A vast percentage of site visitors clicked the button, so CustomMade built the entire capability.

The good news: You don’t need to have a website to employ this strategy. It also works if you’ve got a large social media following. Build a landing page for the product, share it on your networks using customized links, and track the click-through rate. This exercise will tell you how many of your followers would be interested in buying or signing up.

(Oh, and that landing page? Make sure you write something along the lines of “Coming Soon!”, so people don’t get too confused or frustrated.)

3. Audience Building

The most famous example of audience building is probably Product Hunt. After realizing there was no easy way to find the coolest new tech gadgets and products, Ryan Hoover started an email newsletter called “Product Hunt”.

It took him just 20 minutes. Even better? Only 14 days later, Hoover already had 130 subscribers, many of whom were Silicon Valley influencers.

Now, Product Hunt is valued at $22 million.

Copying Product Hunt’s approach is fairly simple. Pick a low-cost (preferably free) method of building a virtual community (Slack, a newsletter, a Facebook group, etc.) that’s tied to your end product.

For example, let’s say you want to build a platform that connects college students looking for portfolio work with businesses looking for freelance interns, as my brilliant friend Lauren Holliday has done with Freelanship. To test the market for Freelanship, Lauren could have first started an informal “matchmaking” service for millennials and startups. The more interest this service garnered, and the more people signed up, the more confident Lauren would be that she could make it a real business.

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by Aja Frost via SitePoint