Manual Testing: The MMVP

The fastest way to build a product is to be the product.

This means you can start by trying to solve the customer's problem with a service first.

I know what you’re thinking. Services businesses don’t scale. That’s true.

But scale isn’t your issue to start with. You don’t even have a single customer, let alone millions. Your challenge is who is your customer, what is their real problem and how do you solve it. And before you tell me that you already know how to solve it, I’ll remind you that you don’t. You may have an idea of how to solve it and with all due respect, you’re most likely wrong. Maybe not wrong on the big things, like ‘it’s an app’. But you’re wrong on the many many little things like what the app does.

Grab the crank, and turn it around. If you be the product, you’ll have more understanding and empathy to build one that does the same work.

If you be the product before you build it, you’ll have a lot more understanding and empathy for how to build the product.

So if you just trust (or humour) me for a second and, then your next question is, so how do I do that?

Use What You Have

My first suggestion to see if you can use existing tools to do the heavy lifting. Again, I can hear you saying, how is that going to work? My product needs to be proprietary technology or else it won’t be mine, no investor will put in money and no company would acquire it. Yes, it does. And it will. But to begin with, you will move a lot faster if you can leverage the hard work that other companies have done to make really useful products.

Existing Tools

1. Email
2. Texting
3. Phone
4. Video calls
5. Spreadsheets
6. Text documents
7. Blogs
8. Website creation tools
9. Paypal
10. Forms

I can imagine the very confused looks on your face when you look at this list. These are just normal tools that anyone can have. How can I make something special with those? It’s not how unique they, are it’s what unique thing you do with them.

Most products are made up of some base functions. Communications (email, text, phone, video calls), promotional material (blog, website creation tools, docs), calculations, databases (spreadsheets), collecting money (PayPal) and collecting information (forms). You can do a lot with just these things. Here is a story to convince you.

A guy named Luke came to the incubator I ran with a team of great people called Pollenizer. He had a vision to create an online marketplace of coaches. They would sign up, set up their accounts with lots of information about what they teach, promote those out to the world, customers would sign up, then the product would allow them to do video calls with each other. Happy days. The coach gets customers and the students get taught. To build that vision out would take many months. It has lots of components. It sounded like a good idea, or at least an idea worth testing.

We didn’t have time or money to spend many months to find out if it would work and honestly there was, again, so many ways we could build it that it was hard to know where to start. During our first meeting, I proposed a manual test. It went something like this:

Mick: “Let’s try and deliver it as a service. I want to know what it’s like to be a coach doing this.”

Luke: “How would you do that?”

Mick: “Well, I do pitch coaching, why don’t I offer that?”

Luke: “OK, how are you going to get customers?”

Mick: “I’ll tweet it, Linkedin it, and Facebook it?”

Luke: “Do we need a website?”

Mick: “We could build a super quick one with Wordpress, but I don’t think we need one. Just the offer.”

Luke wasn’t convinced but I finally got him to let me try it. Here is what we did.

I sent out Tweets etc which said something like;

“I’ve got one pitch coaching slot available but must be done today. $50 instead of $200 for one hour. DM me if keen.”

Five minutes later I got a message on Twitter.

“Mick, I’m pitching my company tomorrow to an investor. I’d appreciate the input. How do we do this?”

I responded: Pay $50 to me via PayPal at <email address> and add my on Skype.

Three minutes later I had $50 in my account.

Four minutes after that I was on Skype doing a coaching session.

Luke watched along and took notes.

‘So what’ you say? ‘How does that help you build a product around it?’

It was very helpful, very cheap (we actually made money) and very very fast. One hour and twelve-minute speed of learning laps.

Here is some of what we learned

1

• Observation — I have a pretty good network, and we got three bites in that first hour, but only one of them actually turned into a session. The promotion was affected by timing, cost, channels, message, subject.
• Lesson — Promotion is definitely a factor. How are the coaches going to get students? Do we do that? Do they do that?
• Action — Talk to coaches about how they do promote. Brainstorm ways we could help. Decide if we want to help great coaches get more students or, new or average coaches get some clients.

2

• Observation — Skype was actually ok for the video delivery. We both already used it, so it was easy to get started without account setup.
• Lesson — Superior video technology was unlikely to be way we win, considering how big Skype, Go-To-Meeting etc was and how no one else had yet cracked it. (This wa pre Zoom and BlueJeans).
• Action — Are there any open source or extensible video conferencing tools available? How good are they?

3

• Observation — Both or us were taking lots of notes and the ‘student’ said “I wish I could record this.” I opened a Google Document and shared it with him, and we both started making notes in the same area. We added the date of the session in case there are more. I also wrote down suggested activities for him as next steps.
• Lesson — Capturing notes would be useful, as would recording the sessions. I also wanted to make notes about my own work, privately from the student, so I need two spaces. The student may too.
• Action — A separate space for follow up activities or homework would be good. This might will probably be in a different way so it can be tracked and marked off.

Result of Manual Test

Was it perfect? No. It was only one person and one session. There is nothing validated there. We need to do more. Many more.

But, two important things happened. Firstly, we got some lessons. Some reinforced our assumptions, some gave them interesting tweaks or questions and some totally surprised us.

Secondly, and more importantly, we got the learning ball rolling. I love fast learning, but when you have a big vision, sometimes it can feel a bit like shortcutting it or diminishing its ambition. It’s not. It’s honouring the ambition, and certainly honouring your investment into it.

It was really important for me to let Luke feel the excitement of learning lessons. He had never experienced the pain of the long, slow, risky approach of building a product on guesses and finding out you got it wrong. It’s a tough lesson to learn (trust me) and very hard to theoretically understand it without actually going through it.

What have you got to lose? Try a manual test today. I mean right now.