Sean Johnson over at Snooty Monkey has passed on some pretty bad advice on how to find problems with your startup idea. The gist of it is you go to a coffee shop and lie to people about “you’re brother’s crazy idea” and have them tell you what’s wrong with it.
The most likely outcome is you’ll hear mostly the same obvious rejections of your idea that you yourself have and have come to believe are surmountable. Your $20 didn’t generate any great new insight, but was cheap check that you aren’t blind to an obvious shortcoming.
A good outcome, is that you hear lots of interesting and sound new objections that you never thought of before. This should give you real pause about your idea. Both its merits, if the objections are good ones, and the extent that you’ve sufficiently thought through your idea and are being realistic about it.
The argument for the “$20 Starbucks Test” is that people will not be honest with you if they know they’re criticizing your work, so you lie to them, buy them a coffee and get some honest feedback. Now this was shared with Sean by Hugh Crean, the ex-CEO of Farecast (a very very good idea) so it has some appeal-to-authority credibility behind it. But I have to say, this sounds goofy to me.
- If you spend your time building something instead of conning in coffee shops, you can put a minimum viable product in front of someone and they’ll tell you very quickly what’s wrong with it/whether they like it or not.
- If no one in your social or business circles will be honest with you on a professional level, you may have bigger problems than whether or not your startup idea is good or bad.
How to test your startup idea…
I’m not one to offer empty criticism. (At least at this very moment; the reality of that statement waxes and wanes.) So I offer three more sincere solutions with accompanying testimony to their worthiness.
Option A. Mechanical Turk surveys from Amazon:
The information I got back for my $27.50 was INVALUABLE. I found from that 1 survey, how to basically build my product for launch. What features I had to have based on how users would use the service. I also realized I could basically cut my current feature set in 1/2 because what I thought people would want, wasn’t even mentioned.
From How I Used Mechanical Turk to Validate my Startup Idea by Lindsey Harper
Option B. Run Google Adwords against a coming soon page:
Instead of doing formal focus groups or initial lengthy primary research interviews, we’ll start with a more informal process that will deliver results quickly and inexpensively. This is not perfect, but a great place to start in the de-risking process. It’s quick, easy, and capital efficient.
From Five Surprising Ways To De-Risk Your New Idea Using Google Adwords by Steve Barsh
Option C. Ask people to commit to pay for it:
I didn’t start WPEngine until I had 30 people saying they will give me $49/mo. Not would, but will. In the end, 20 actually did. Our message resonates with hundreds of thousands of people, and new people sign up every day though we’ve still spent $0 on general marketing.
From Vetting a startup (or two): The systematic birth of @WPEngine by Jason Cohen
This last one is the best in my opinion. Find a non-trivial amount of people to commit to paying you for the service you propose. No matter what else they say to you, if they don’t hand over the money you’ll know how they really feel.
