I was surprised to see the experiment deemed a failure after only one week. Do most folks feel that one week is sufficient time to ascertain this? One week seems hardly enough to even start propagating a website through Google... ?
Definitely not 100% conclusive evidence. But, after sending it to our almost 1,000 friends and families and seeing just 2 urls submitted after a week, we knew it was going to be widely used. After all, these are people very motivated to try the product (or I guess they could secretly not like us...)
knew it was _NOT_ going to be widely used
I don't think it's enough but this might be the new thing to do. Leo from Buffer posted something last week about how they put up a simple landing page to gauge interest and decided to only spend time on the product if there was enough interest. I think he mentions building version 1 in just 7 weeks. If you can create an MVP in a month or so (less is even better) then I think that's the way to go! Maybe Google is irrelevant. Maybe it's better to leave Google out of it. If you can send it to some choice people and you get some good feedback primarily from those people sharing your link then that's probably even better than having Google on your side. If I had a choice I'd want my product to be so good people take the time to spread the word for me rather than relying on Google to hopefully point the right people in my direction.