Testing Techniques (Thu Oct 25, lecture 14)
How do we test our assumptions?

Homework due for today

Legend: : Participation | : Early | : PDF | : Team | : Zipped

1. Teams: Develop and test a landing page. This is a team deliverable. Make sure you tie it to a real hypothesis. Be specific in the audience to whom you are presenting it so you can make sense of what it’s telling you. Try to get it out there to get some responses to it. This is also one of the deliverables for Stage 2 of Term Project Outline. Here are lots of more tips on how to proceed: Landing page. Team Deliverable: Brief report on process and results. Include url to the actual page.
2. Teams: Look at: Five Second Test and choose an aspect of your product to test using this site. It can be a paper mockup, a product name, a tag line, or anything else. Team Deliverable: post of what you tested and what the result was. Include a link to the site or a screen capture of the result.
3. Read The following articles:
   • Growing Convertkit to $5,020 in Monthly Recurring Revenue.
   • Experiment Examples to Get You Started Testing your Idea
   • Idea to Paying Customers in 7 Weeks: How We Did It
   • This is an individual assignment. Based on this reading, write up one or two original ideas for MVPs that you think would be really effective for your product. Preferably not a google form. Write it up in a way that you could acually implement it over the coming weekend. Make sure you tie it to a hypothesis that you and your team have prioritized. Deliverable: Brief writeup of your proposed MVP as a pdf submitted to Latte
4. Weekly Team Update: Submit your Weekly Progress Updates according to the instructions. Team Deliverable: Weekly Progress Update

Continuing work

• Continue to work on Stage 2: Will be due on November 13. Decide on and do more out of the building testing: survey, 1-1 interview, landing page, anything else you can think of. Make sure you know and indicate what the hypotheses were that you were testing as well as the methodology and results of the test. Record your work and the results. Remember we are looking for non-trivial amount of outside testing. You will need it for your term report.

Goal of the MVP

• “Prove” or “Disprove” a customer, problem or solution hypothesis
• Hypothesis should be well stated!
• It should be “falsifiable”

Types of MVPs

A catalog of approaches to collecting “out of the building” information on the journey to product market fit. Click on the links to learn more about each approach.

title	description
Focus Group Feedback	Small group open discussion for feedback and ideas. Face to face lightly moderated meeting.
One on one interviews	One on one conversations / interviews
Online Surveys	The simplest technique of all: an online survey
Use Ad Tools for metrics	Facebook and Google both provide tools that can be used to do quanitative research
Concierge MVP	Simulate a product or service "by hand"
Paper Prototype	Prototype or mockup of user experience, but on paper
Video MVP	Videos, screen casts, animations and simulations to explain and get feedback
Social media, etc.	Sending targeted questions using social media and other lists
Landing page	A single page web site, used to convey information and measure interest
Elevator Pitch	Brief verbal or written summary of proposition

Elevator Pitch Exercise

Background

• We are going to try our hand at designing an elevator pitch for a product or service that you know well. You can also referer to Elevator Pitch
• Think about who the pitch is to, because the way the pitch goes is different depending on the audience
• In general the elevator pitch should be short, and it has a goal of persuading a particular audience that they should be interested in your product and want to learn more about it
• Remember This is not an ad on radio or tv, it’s a pitch between you and a person you are trying to influece.

Mission

• Break into teams and discuss the problem. Come up with the best elevator pitch for one of these products would be. While you don’t want a fixed script you do want to make sure you write down all the key points or phrases to make sure you don’t leave anything out.
• Meet with your sister team and compare what you came up with and then refine to produce one unified result. Prepare to deliver the pitch and also give an explanation of what you are trying to achieve with each piece of it.

Specific assignments

• Team 1 and 2: Harley Davidson (Audience: Big Time Investor)
• Team 3 and 4: Godiva Chocolates (Audience: National retail chain)
• Team 5 and 6: Brandeis University (Audience: Big time donor)
• Team 7 and 8: NEST Thermostat (Audience: Real estate moguls)
• Team 9 and 10: Jet.com (Audience: Big time investor)

Next Class

• Look at homework: Testing Techniques