If I got really down I would listen to Frank Sinatra’s song ‘That’s Life.’ You know, the lyrics that go ‘as funny as it may seem, some people get their kicks stompin’ on a dream.’
- Aaron Patzer, founder of Mint.com on how he dealt with self-doubt and the skepticism he encountered from almost every investor he pitched to
28. Validation and Outreach (March)
With our Beta starting to shape up for launch, I really wanted to get the product into the market and start getting feedback. I spent most of March validating/testing my product.
Outreach to entrepreneurs
Before the product was ready to test, I reached out to people who’s opinions I respected, i.e. start-up entrepreneurs who’s blogs I read and followed on twitter. Here are a few of the people I reached out to – Andrew Chen, Amir Khella, Ben Yoskowitz, Jason Baptiste, among others. To be honest, I never expected a response from a single one of them. I sent them a personal email telling them how their blogs helped me be a better entrepreneur, talked briefly about what I was working on and attached screen-shots of the product. Being the class acts they were, they all responded. Every one of their reviews was positive and mentioned that they would be interested in checking out the product. Can’t wait to get the final product in their hands.
In addition, I also reached out to do a few guest blog posts. Here’s an article I wrote on Bill Mullins’ Weblog, a Technorati Top 150 blog.
User-Testing
The day finally came when I felt the product was in decent enough shape for users to test. I decided to use UserTesting to get user feedback. This is an awesome service – would recommend it to anyone wanting to get feedback on their product. I can’t explain how big of a step this is. Getting the product into actual users hands…even testers is a big deal! You hold your breath when you ship it out… and exhale of relief when it’s received well.
The overall reactions to the product were very positive, both from a UI & product standpoint. Small (but big) win! They brought up some issues that we hadn’t thought of, so it was great that we did this. We ended up making some critical UI changes based on their feedback.
Lessons Learned: Your product isn’t as bad as you think. Get it out there. As a founder you’re paranoid about your product, but in all likely hood you’ve done a good job and users won’t hate it. You’ll only learn how to make your product better.
Tags: MVP, PR, Pre-Launch, Proof of Concept, Startup Marketing, Testing
