3 ms·
Ask HN: How much user validation is enough? When to build?
It seems that people have gotten a bad taste in their mouth with respect to building useless products due to lack of user validation. And that's fine. But it also seems that people are too afraid to build anything until users give them a green light every step of the way. I.e. we've gone too far the other way.
I'm literally stuck in meetings sometimes debating whether or not to put a hold on the next electronic prototype of a product because we're unsure how to position the UI: pixels on the goddamn screen, of the old one. Because we can't move forward until we know exactly what we're going to build... Excuse my frustration, but if this is your legitimate source of contention as a startup, then you're probably building a commodity rather than a technology. Which is fine, but definitely isn't the case for all companies.
How many user surveys are enough to show interest in a concept? How many email signups on your landing page should it take to move forwards and build out a product? Here's a harder question: you have a prototype, you've done some user surveys - when to direct the team's attention to finishing out the product rather than market research (a serious issue for say a 3-person team).
The way I see it, anyone can make a decision with perfect information or someone telling you just do it, while the opportunity for a new venture lies in moving fast in the general right direction. There's a trade-off: by the time you're certain people want something, someone's probably already made it. I like to believe that logic and first-principles reasoning can be an efficient alternative to never-ending user validation.
Thoughts?
- dueprocess 12y agoFor me, it all depends on how big the project is. If it would be faster for me to build an MVP than get convincing user validation, I'll build it. The MVP can test my hypothesis. But there are no easy answers. You could do user validation up the wazoo and still fail. I suggest looking at other indicators (interest level, budget) or do a weighted pros and cons list.
- dennybritz 12y agoIn hindsight it is always easy to say "If only I had validated my assumptions before building." But this neglects the fact that you must know the right question to ask and the right hypotheses to validate in the first place. Doing customer interviews without clear objectives is a waste of time. I have found that you often come across thyour hypotheses while building the product, not from before-the-fact customer interviews. Building forces you to consider the design space of your product, and raises specific questions that you can later ask your customers about. So, let's not forget the overall goal of customer validation: Learning. If you believe that you can learn more about the market and customer needs by spending a couple of days/weeks building a product before doing the next round of interviews then do that. Of course, neither building nor interviewing work in isolation. They are a continuous loop. Interviewing without building is only useful for very initial marketing research. Similarly, building without feedback can lead you down a rabbit hole. So, how do you decide what to do next? Building or collecting feedback? Do what gives you the most learning for the time spent. If you are a developer and can build things really quickly, it's probably a good idea to do that. If you are non-technical then customer interviews may give your more learning for less time spent.