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Mike Lyons explains how to test product ideas with prototypes and MVPs. He covers practical tactics like landing pages, ad campaigns, and the Fake Door method, then shows how Man Crates used these approaches to validate demand before scaling.
Mike Lyons explains how to test product ideas with prototypes and MVPs. He covers practical tactics like landing pages, ad campaigns, and the Fake Door method, then shows how Man Crates used these approaches to validate demand before scaling.
Have you ever used a product and come across a feature or component and thought to yourself, who would ever use this feature? Testing our ideas and assumptions with prototypes and minimum viable products before building the full solution. That helps us avoid that. And it saves us time and money and frustrations and headaches. It also helps us learn what customers actually need, not just what we think they need. Now, a prototype. Well, this is anything that helps you learn from customers, from simple sketches to working software. This might mean showing customers paper drawings of a new dashboard layout, or it could be a clickable mockup of how a new screen would work. The key is learning something specific from each test. Now, minimum viable products or MVPs. Well, these are special types of prototypes that test your core product ideas. They answer one main question. Will our customers actually use and value this solution? Now, these are fully functional and they can actually be used by the customer. Something to keep in mind with all of this is that testing our ideas. It works best when we have some basic rules. I've got another handout for you. You'll find it below this lesson, but let me share a few key ones here. Make your ideas something people can see and touch. No PowerPoint slides or vaporware. And also, you don't want to get stuck on your first idea. Instead, test several solutions at once. And be sure to start simple. You can always make things fancier later. A paper prototype that teaches you something is better than a perfect prototype that teaches you nothing. Check out the complete guide down below. It's a great tool for how you're going to plan out your tests. Now let me give you some actual practical examples of how you can test your product. You might create a simple landing page. This is just a webpage that explains your idea. It lets you see if people are interested enough to click, learn more or sign up. Another way to test is to create an ad campaign where you try running basic ads to test if your message catches people's attention. It helps you figure out what words or features people care about. You could also create an explainer video. This is just a short video showing how your product would work. Dropbox famously used this. They put up a video showing how file syncing would work before writing any code. That video got 70,000 signups overnight. Here's a fancy one. The Fake Door. Put up a button or link for a feature that doesn't exist yet just to see if people will try to use it. Here's one of my favorites, the wizard of Oz mvp. This is where it looks automated, but behind the curtain Everything's done manually. This is how Zappos started. Their website allowed you to choose your shoes, but it was based on pictures of shoes from local stores. And when someone bought them, they would run to the store, buy the shoes, and then ship them out. And finally, we have the Concierge mvp. This is where you give super personal service to a few customers to learn exactly what they need before building anything big. Now, just a quick, fun example of combining two MVP types I want to tell you about. Man crates. Back in 2012, Jonathan Beekman had an idea for selling unique gift crates for men that you had to open with a crowbar. But instead of building inventory, he got creative. With just $1,000, he built a website showcasing different gift crates. But here's the clever part. He only had actually one real crate. When people tried to order, he immediately refunded their money and offered a 50% off coupon for future purchases. That's the fake door MVP, letting people try something out that doesn't actually exist yet to test real interest. But then he added the Concierge MVP twist. He personally called every customer, tried to order, apologized for not having inventory, and turned it into a customer interview. What surprised him was that instead of getting angry, people were excited to talk. These calls often lasted 30 or 45 minutes, giving him deep insight to what customers really wanted. Now, by combining two approaches, he got both hard data showing what people would pay for and rich customer feedback about why they wanted to buy. This gave him the confidence to build the real business, which hit 22 million in sales just a few years later. The lesson? Sometimes the smartest MVP isn't choosing between different types of finding clever ways to combine them. But I want you to keep something in mind. Some tests, they're going to fail. That's good. What on earth are you talking about? Failed tests prevent failed products. It's way better to learn early when changes are cheap. Your job as a product owner is to figure out what you need to learn and then choose the simplest way to learn it and use that learning to guide what you build. That's how you'll grow your product. It's how you'll keep customers happy and reach those business goals. Not with big risky bets, but with small, smart tests that point the way forward.
