Monkeys on Typewriters

Building a product from scratch is hard work. This gets even harder as you begin to build a demo version for your initial audience. You start with what you enjoy i.e. building features and then start to delve into what you do not enjoy such as creating made up data around customers, their interactions and product outcomes. As you share your demo, work on feedback, the whole process of building more features and even more fake data starts. In this article, we will detail why data generation is a problem and how you can solve it in less time.

If you have infinite time and infinite monkeys, you can stop reading this article and instead read about the infinite monkey theorem to get the right data for your product (in theory). Read more about that on Wikipedia. If you don't have infinite monkeys or time, keep reading.

This is how it all begins. Well, at least the way we experienced it ourselves and have heard about it from our customers multiple times.

An idea is born

You came across a fantastic product idea and are convinced that it is the one thing that your future customers are waiting for. You are excited and start to share the idea with others who seem to agree with you. So, you begin the journey of building the product.

Early-stage demo

During the early demos, you key in the input data manually or use one of the many random data generations for the products. You care more about the functionality of the product and less about the quality of the data needed for the prototype. As you prepare for the demo, you start to notice that the data doesn’t make much sense. You make adjustments to your narration by saying things like "...imagine that this graph on the report looks like..". You are doing well so far.

Need for the real fake

As more feature enhancements are made, the manual mock up data seems either totally gibberish or does not seem practical from a demo perspective. This is the time you realize that the random data that you have used makes sense for testing the functionality but not for the demo. You start to write down the various user stories that seem real and take help from others to start filling in the data to match the user stories. This task consumes a lot of your time and most of your patience.

To build features or prepare for demo?

Questions such as “what if xxx happens or xxx is skipped, how would that look like?” will start to create more user stories and more test data. You and your team will start to spend more time generating data for the demo than building new features. Lets face it, not many developers enjoy generating synthetic data as much as they love building cool new features.

Uncovr to the rescue

At FOYI, we have seen this use case repeatedly with many of our customers. So, we built a SaaS product Uncovr to help you make this an easy and simple task. Whether you are a product owner, developer or a startup founder, generating test data for your demo could be a very painful experience and we are here for you.

Start building features, not dummy data

Head over to Uncovr documentation to give it a try or reach out to us today for a quick chat on how we can customize it for your specific need.