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independence6 unconnected
applies to

b2b and consumer, no audience needed

confidence

high

evidence

8 claims · 7 articles · 4 receipts

window

2013-08-04 → 2024-06-08

6 builders who never spoke to each other

Test the mock-up, not the code

Put wireframes, a slide deck or a design-tool prototype in front of real clients and watch the reaction before committing engineering time. Build with a small advisory group of buyers rather than for them, and use an existing product's community as the test bed where repeat usage is evidence instead of opinion.

The method

  1. 01

    Test a product concept on that captive audience using wireframes or a slide deck and watch how they react, before committing engineering time.

  2. 02

    Recruit a small advisory group of buyers and build the product with them rather than for them.

  3. 03

    Show the draft offer to a handful of people who match your ideal customer and change it according to what they react to before you build it.

  4. 04

    Build the technology after establishing that it solves a problem someone has, and keep the team at two good engineers until then.

  5. 05

    Do not treat the go-to-market plan you already believe in as the only option: run it as a small pilot first and see whether it produces the result you assumed.

What it returned

  • 18

    For its first 18 months the Moz product was little more than a handful of tools, several with free equivalents elsewhere on the web, plus written guides.

  • Paula Pant used a customer advisory board to co-build her course Your First Rental Property.

  • The founder's earlier venture Profit Button skipped market research, built technology nobody needed and hired a large team at the earliest stage, which she names as her worst mistakes.

  • Viewst described the prototype in words with a designer and a CTO, built it in Figma, interviewed clients in several countries about production problems, then re-approached them with the mockup and revised it before any prototype was written.

Sources

the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

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the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

963 corroborated plays to draw from · 3 a week

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