I've been wondering on the pros and cons of interviewing customers vs. just putting something out there and seeing the reaction/getting a commitment.
There's a great book about the latter called "The Right It" by Alberto Savoia (a guy who used to work at Google to test business ideas). There he describes 8 different ways to test a biz idea:
- The Mechanical Turk – Replace complex and expensive computers or machines with human beings.
- The Pinocchio – Build a non-functional, “lifeless”, version of the
product.
- The Minimum Viable Product (or Stripped Tease) – Create a
functional version of it, but stripped down to its most basic functionality.
- The Provincial – Before launching world-wide, run a test on a
very small sample.
- The Fake Door – Create a fake “entry” for a product that doesn’t
yet exist in any form
- The Pretend-to-Own – Before investing in buying whatever you
need for your it, rent or borrow it first.
- The Re-label – Put a different label on an existing product that
looks like the product you want to create.
A ques to the author (I saw he commented here). What do you think are the pros and cons of interviewing people using the MOM framework vs. just putting something out there and getting feedback? Often people give very different feedback when you ask them questions vs. present something and ask for skin in the game.
B2C and '10x improvement' style ideas tend to need to lead with a prototype (although you ideally first do enough discovery conversations to understand what they're already doing and why). The early product iteration is what Uber got right and Segway got wrong, and it's why the best videogame studios (like Blizzard 10+ years ago) always begin with prototypes of isolated core game mechanics, iterating those ruthlessly until they feel "crunchy" (the game industry term for immediately rewarding interactions).
Whereas ideas that are solving a well-defined, unsolved problem (which is way more common in niche B2B and the sorts of ideas that you'd bootstrap toward) can be pretty fully validated with ONLY conversation, which is obviously extremely quick and quite advantageous.
Apart from those two big categories, there are a million edge cases where the whole suite of approaches you mention can feel like a (somewhat situational) superpower.
There's a great book about the latter called "The Right It" by Alberto Savoia (a guy who used to work at Google to test business ideas). There he describes 8 different ways to test a biz idea:
- The Mechanical Turk – Replace complex and expensive computers or machines with human beings.
- The Pinocchio – Build a non-functional, “lifeless”, version of the product.
- The Minimum Viable Product (or Stripped Tease) – Create a functional version of it, but stripped down to its most basic functionality.
- The Provincial – Before launching world-wide, run a test on a very small sample.
- The Fake Door – Create a fake “entry” for a product that doesn’t yet exist in any form
- The Pretend-to-Own – Before investing in buying whatever you need for your it, rent or borrow it first.
- The Re-label – Put a different label on an existing product that looks like the product you want to create.
A ques to the author (I saw he commented here). What do you think are the pros and cons of interviewing people using the MOM framework vs. just putting something out there and getting feedback? Often people give very different feedback when you ask them questions vs. present something and ask for skin in the game.