We built the product first. Then we tested whether people understood it.
Everyone says to test demand before you build. We didn’t. We built the product first, like a lot of people do, and only afterward found a fast way to test the part we’d skipped.
What we’re testing now isn’t really the idea - it’s the positioning: Does someone landing on our page understand what the product is? Does the offer make sense? Does the pricing feel right?
We use a paid research panel (Prolific, though there are others like Wynter, PickFu and Lyssna) to put the page in front of people who match our audience. They read it and answer a short questionnaire: What do you think this does? Do you understand it? Does the price seem fair? You pick the audience, they review, you pay per response. A few hours to prepare, results back the same day.
It's been most useful for catching where people misread the offer - something our existing users can’t really tell us, because they already understood it well enough to sign up. We’ll use this approach for landing page changes from now on, and we’ll run these tests before building the next thing rather than after.
How do you test whether people understand your product or your idea before you commit to it?
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Continuing this research it looks like people skim the texts and combine words that they noticed into a single story and understanding. As it turns out, what I thought was one of the best sections of the home page was causing the visitors to misunderstand the message, resulting in the total opposite of what I tried to convey.
@artk This part surprised me as well. Good argument for testing the wording rather than trusting our own read of it.
CookieYes
This probably doesn’t answer your question directly, but it reminded me of something I noticed while doing hiring calls. I used to ask candidates to explain what the company/product does, mainly to see if they had done their research before the interview.
What was interesting was that sometimes people had clearly looked into it, but still found it hard to explain the product in a simple way. That made me realise this kind of question can also be a useful test of how clearly a product is understood by someone seeing it from the outside.
I never expected hiring calls to give that kind of insight, but they sometimes do.
@shreya_r_nambiar That connects really well - yours is the same test in a different setting - you find out fast whether the outside-in version matches what you meant. I had not thought of hiring calls as a comprehension check. Thank you for sharing it :)