Ask HN: Best process to validate idea and feature-set before MVP?

5 points·bdclimber14··6 comments

I think there's a fine balance between early pre-coding research and initial MVP release. I'm wondering what others do to quickly validate an idea and initial feature set before developing an MVP. One way is to ask the HN community, but I feel like it's spammy, and never gets the desired results either (could also be my ideas).

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Just go to your contacts, email them one by one with personalized message, or utilize any connections you have on Facebook or Twitter.

You might find my idea validating blog post relevant: http://artsyeditor.com/2011/04/how-did-i-get-38-willing-to-p...

Thanks for that, I remember stumbling on it last week, but couldn't remember where I saw it.

Paper prototyping will give you very quick feedback, especially if you can talk a living, breathing potential customer into being your guinea pig. In fact, without that, it's worth a lot less.

If you can't find a hot lead to sit in the driver's seat, then that might tell you something about both your idea and the market you're aiming at.

Landing page?

That's part of it, but the real question is how to get people to know about it, and not just anyone, but your target customer.

How do you plan to find customers post-launch, presumably you have some sort of marketing strategy in mind (whether it's cold-calling or buying advertising), so use that technique to get some initial feedback as well.

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