10 No Code Ways to Validate Your Business Idea
5 min read
A very common mistake that founders make is spending significant time and money building a complete product or service, without integrating enough customer feedback in the process. More often than not, this leads to investing in a product that no one actually wants or will pay for.
To avoid this mistake, we recommend running solution-tests. Solution-tests are different methods for attempting to quickly solve the customer's problem. The goal is to interact with our customers directly and immediately, to get important feedback; Are we solving the right problem for them? Is the value that we're delivering with this solution working for them? Is their problem even solvable? We can figure out these critical questions before spending time and cash building a complete product or service. Moreover, the customer insights that we gain from doing these tests will give us the information we need to make the right next step - whether that’s building the next version of our solution, or taking a step backwards and shifting our customer segment or pain-point.
The best part of solution testing is that we do NOT need technical skills! Here are 10 no-code, low-code ways to validate your business idea before building a complete solution!
Ad Test - It might feel like it's jumping the gun to create an advertisement when you don't even have a clear solution yet. But at this stage, rather than thinking about ads as a marketing tool for growth, we're going to think about them as a research tool to help us better understand our market. The objective here isn't to reach as many people as possible or to maximize your ad spend return-on-investment (ROI). Instead, our goal is to learn more about who our customer is, where they are, and how to speak to them. Ad testing will help with our ongoing mission to continue to refine our customer persona and hone in on our early adopter.
Pitch Test - For anyone you've already interviewed who you think might be an excellent early adopter (you believe they'd pay for your solution), get a confirmation by doing a pitch test. The purpose of a pitch test is to gauge the customer’s interest in our proposed value proposition: Is this valuable to the customer? Are they willing to pay? Will they give you their credit card? If not, why not? Remember, people are terrible at predicting their future actions. A better way to go about validating your idea is to have them "show us" or demonstrate the degree to which they like our idea by making some form of commitment. Different types of commitments can take the form of: Money (ideally), Data/Information, Time, Case Studies, Referrals, and White Papers. If they’re a business, ideally, you get an LOI from them. Use a pitch test to get feedback and co-create something before you go build it!
Concierge - One great way to test our solution is by manually performing it as a service. While you won't be able to serve many people with a concierge test, it does allow us to work with the customer immediately (minimal building required). It will help us learn what labor inputs need to be automated to make it more scalable. Another benefit to the concierge MVP is how easy it is to adjust your solution, allowing us to iterate quickly! It may not work for all customer segments and problems, but it is an especially effective way to get feedback on our value proposition and product.
Community - By community we mean bringing together a group of customers in an intentional way to connect and engage with one another. Creating a community for your not-yet launched product can be a great way to continue to do customer discovery while working with the customers regularly and providing some value. It can be utilized by you as a founder to help you better understand your customer's problem and to get sign-ups for future pilot tests.
Content - Given that the first place people go when they don't know how to do something is Google or YouTube, providing useful how-to content in the form of blog posts, guides, or videos is a quick way to see if there’s interest around the problem you’re looking to address. An example of a company that did this is Glossier. Before the skincare company created their favorite cult products, they first started as a blog creating content around skincare. They posted about the skincare routines of models and celebrities and introduced their readers to new products. This way, they were able to learn what their audience was interested in and launch their products to that audience without expensive marketing costs.
Events - Events can be an effective way to bring together a group of your customers, especially those hard to reach enterprise customers. While events can sometimes be a lot of work to promote and put together, they don't have to be very big or formal affairs (and can be done virtually!). Events allow you to test interest in different topics and themes around a particular problem area. Similar to workshops and webinars, charging for an event can also help to gauge customers' willingness to pay to have their problem solved. Events also allow you to create a more personal relationship than a purely online community that can translate to a more engaged community. They may help you feel more comfortable making “asks” like customer interviews. As the host, it also puts you in a prominent position and lends you some credibility as opposed to just attending someone else's event.
Tools - Create something your customers can use themselves to solve a problem they've identified. The tool can take the form of anything from a custom-coded website to a self-administered quiz to a template or calculator created on a spreadsheet. The main benefit is that this solution test is very scalable (you could get lots of people to test it and give you their thoughts). The questions you want to ask yourself when you build a tool are: Did I already solve their problem? If so, do I monetize this product, or can I expand on it? Is it a large enough market that I can sell ads? Are they asking for more? Is there something more premium that I can build on top of it?
Frankenstein or “Hacked” Solution - One quick way to create a functional product is to use applications and software tools that already exist and connect them through a workflow app like Zapier. Zapier allows thousands of different tools to talk to each other automatically. If your customer sends in a request via a Typeform on your website, that information can be automatically sent to your information database on Airtable, and depending on what information the customer inputs, you can then trigger an email notification via Mailchimp.
No Code - If a Frankenstein solution won’t cut it because you can’t find the right existing software to leverage or those tools don’t connect to the Zapier API, another option is to use a no-code development platform like Bubble (for desktop and mobile web browsers). While you don’t need to learn to code, there is a learning curve to these platforms. But it will be much faster and cheaper to deploy and update a solution on Bubble versus taking a coding course, hiring someone technical or outsourcing to a development firm. The key is to avoid over-engineering, and rather to focus on the single feature for delivering the most important value to the user. Give yourself a limit of one week to create something.
Wizard of Oz - Wizard of Oz test is having your customers interact with an automated product on the front-end that you are actually operating manually without their knowledge on the back-end. This allows you to test the core value of your solution or product features, without first investing time and money in building.The manual operator can be you, or you can use a service like Mechanical Turk. An example is CardMunch. The iPhone app turned business cards into digital contacts more accurately than any other app in 2010. How did they do it? Accuracy was vital for users, but character recognition technology was still inaccurate. So the founders hired human transcribers from Mechanical Turk. In one year, they scanned more than two million cards and got acquired by LinkedIn.
(Bonus!) Prototype / Demo - If you have the skills to create and deliver a prototype or demo quickly, you can always do so. Having a visual or physical prototype or demo of your product is a powerful communication tool. Just remember, that early on our goal is to work with the customer immediately and gain a greater understanding of their problems and how to solve them (versus what features they want). Prototypes and demos come in many forms depending on your product and have various degrees of complexity. We generally recommend starting with something that's low effort. If you're building a web or mobile app or another type of software, you can prototype even using just pen and paper, before considering prototyping tools like Balsamiq. For physical products, consider constructing a prototype with whatever you have lying around, even cardboard boxes. Be sure to create a waitlist to capture anyone who might be interested.
