LEAN STARTUP STEPS: STEP 3 - Lean Experiment

"Every product’s reality is determined before it’s built." - Trevor Owens, Lean Startup Machine

You can test the viability of your solution without actually build it. That is what we call a Lean Experiment. Be creative and, using the existent tools out there (papers, bloggers, emails, web forms, etc...), find ways to simulate the real experience of people using your product before you build it.

Steve Blank's Udacity class

"Innovation takes a lot of testing."

"Moving from concept to execution."

Examples

Real Time Performance Meter for Tennis Players

The video above shows an experiment to test people's interest on a device to be applied to a tennis raquet to test the performance and efficience of the player's movements. All material used by the experiment to test their hypothesis was a normal raquet with a rubber piece on it and a walktalk machine to make random noises. With this experiment the startup team was able to collect a lot of important information on which exactly types of tennis players will like the product and how and which ones will not use the product and why.

Real Time Feedback Collector for Events

This next example tests how people will prefer to provide feedback on events. The experiment uses simple sticky notes to collect real time feedback from attendees on a small event. People were asked to write their feedback on a paper and after they were asked to tell the feedback out loud.

The first hypothesis tests if
people will like to provide feedback
on a paper rather then verbally.

The second hypothesis tests if
people will use a mobile app
to provide feedback on an event.

The experiment above only started the process to validate the hipotheses. It needs different tests for a complete validation. But it was already very impressive the amount of learnings we've got with such a cheap test.