Dan Martell - September 04, 2017


How To Test Your Software Idea With No Coding Experience


Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

190.31036

Word count

1,676

Sentence count

88

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about the best way to test your software idea and how to get it right the first time, and why it's important to have the right framework in place to make sure you get your idea right.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.600 Dude.
00:00:01.360 Dude.
00:00:01.940 Dude, I almost went for it and then you said
00:00:04.300 you weren't ready?
00:00:13.540 How to test your software idea.
00:00:15.940 Look, I get calls all the time from people that's like,
00:00:18.080 this is my first time and I want to get it right.
00:00:20.020 Or I don't know anybody in the tech space.
00:00:23.600 Or I want to make sure I don't waste my money.
00:00:27.720 I think I get it.
00:00:28.660 Those fears are right, okay?
00:00:29.900 Those are challenges that are absolutely correct,
00:00:32.000 but what I wanna share with you in this framework
00:00:34.180 is really the quickest way to test,
00:00:37.580 and my promise is no cost.
00:00:39.440 Can you imagine that, at no cost?
00:00:40.780 And you're talking software, I'm saying no cost.
00:00:43.040 And with the highest probability of succeeding.
00:00:46.480 Now, the first thing you need to understand is that
00:00:49.060 the probabilities are low and it's okay.
00:00:51.580 I think there's different levels of failure.
00:00:53.760 And I think that it's okay if you don't figure it out
00:00:57.520 right away, but you keep swinging, right?
00:00:59.900 You only fail once you get out of the game.
00:01:02.040 It doesn't matter what inning you're in,
00:01:03.160 as long as you keep getting at bat and swing,
00:01:05.100 you're gonna win.
00:01:05.940 I learned this in a big way in my company, Flowtown.
00:01:08.180 We went through a ton of different iterations,
00:01:10.940 but we got to a point where we built the wrong product,
00:01:13.340 brought it to market.
00:01:14.340 It was a landing page app of all things.
00:01:16.080 It was called LandingPayGuess.
00:01:17.680 It was like .es with a G for it.
00:01:20.220 Long story, not getting into it.
00:01:22.120 But the next iteration changed everything.
00:01:24.900 We decided to focus on a core feature,
00:01:27.420 and we went, we tested it in the market,
00:01:29.560 and we found customers to pre-buy, get involved,
00:01:32.760 and that eventually helped prove and fund
00:01:36.200 the further development to get our customers
00:01:38.260 to the point where we got raw and profitable.
00:01:40.180 Now, I'm gonna share with you guys some key areas
00:01:43.440 and aspects that I kind of extracted from that process
00:01:45.580 and I've used for my next company, Clarity,
00:01:47.940 and literally at this point, almost thousands
00:01:50.220 and thousands of startups I've helped advise
00:01:52.080 to build products.
00:01:53.080 The first thing is to start off assuming you're wrong.
00:01:56.020 I think most founders have a hard time doing that
00:01:58.020 because it seems schizophrenic.
00:01:59.320 At one sense, I need to feel like,
00:02:01.160 I call it exclamation mark.
00:02:02.560 I'm gonna take over the world and this is gonna work
00:02:04.620 and this is amazing.
00:02:05.720 Cause they almost need that internal like motivation
00:02:08.900 and energy to do something.
00:02:10.760 But at the same time, you gotta be humble
00:02:12.700 and honest with yourself and say, you know what?
00:02:14.140 There's probably some aspect of this strategy
00:02:16.380 and the ideas that I've put forth
00:02:18.000 that are probably gonna be wrong.
00:02:19.780 And I think if you start at that level,
00:02:21.880 it's just a way easier conversation to move in
00:02:25.080 to the following steps I'm gonna share.
00:02:26.980 The second thing is to list all of your assumptions.
00:02:29.820 I think when you build a business, there's unexpressed,
00:02:34.580 you didn't express them, but there's assumptions you're
00:02:36.580 making that if those things are wrong,
00:02:38.400 it could be around marketing.
00:02:40.460 You know, how do I get in front of the customers?
00:02:41.960 It could be about getting customers.
00:02:44.400 Who is this right for?
00:02:45.800 It could be around the tech, the technology, the APIs,
00:02:48.960 how you're actually gonna build it.
00:02:50.540 Or it could even be around the cost.
00:02:51.980 I think it'll cost X to build or I could sell it
00:02:55.340 for whatever wide price and those are huge assumptions.
00:02:58.480 So step one is make the list.
00:03:00.840 Everything you can possibly think about your idea
00:03:03.880 and how you think it's gonna be in five years,
00:03:05.780 make that list of assumptions and start thinking
00:03:08.320 about those different categories.
00:03:09.880 The next step, which is the third step,
00:03:13.220 wait one sec, we are at, assume you're wrong,
00:03:17.160 list all assumptions, look at the different categories.
00:03:21.560 Sorry, that's step three.
00:03:22.800 Four is to prioritize, okay?
00:03:26.040 I do prioritize like this because I don't know
00:03:27.900 if you've ever seen like the sort button in the toolbar,
00:03:31.400 you know, in like Word or whatever.
00:03:33.280 It's like these two arrows, one down, one up.
00:03:34.980 So sort the right order of the assumptions
00:03:39.420 starting with the riskiest assumption.
00:03:41.080 That's the framework name which is what is
00:03:43.460 the riskiest assumption that if I prove to be wrong,
00:03:47.400 the whole business doesn't work, right?
00:03:50.060 For example, if I'm Uber and my idea is that people are
00:03:53.000 going to use an app to request a car and I test will anybody
00:03:57.240 use their mobile phone to hail a cab and nobody does that part,
00:04:02.340 the rest of the business doesn't work.
00:04:03.900 So there's like fundamental changes in human behavior that
00:04:07.820 you're assuming that people are going to do that they may never
00:04:10.520 do that would cause the whole thing to be wrong.
00:04:14.160 One of my favorite stories around this was one time I was
00:04:16.820 asked to sit down with these kids,
00:04:18.660 these entrepreneurs from middle school
00:04:21.300 and they had a ton of different ideas.
00:04:22.520 But one of the entrepreneurial groups, these kids,
00:04:25.620 had an idea to build what I call an energy park.
00:04:28.360 Essentially, it's a park for kids
00:04:30.900 that as the kids play on the park, right,
00:04:34.100 I don't even know how it would work other than the swing,
00:04:36.140 but like swing on the swing or do the teeter totter
00:04:40.080 or whatever other mechanical type of toys
00:04:42.280 they could put together, spinning things that make noise,
00:04:45.480 they would capture the energy from the kids playing
00:04:48.380 and it would get fed back into the grid.
00:04:51.060 Now, there's a lot of assumptions there,
00:04:53.360 especially living, I mean, just starting off with the climate.
00:04:55.960 I live in Canada where it's freezing and cold,
00:04:58.960 so could you even manufacture the gear in a way
00:05:02.360 that would work for seasonality, right?
00:05:05.260 So there's a ton of assumptions.
00:05:06.740 The other assumption is could you generate enough electricity
00:05:09.840 with the median range of usage of a park
00:05:12.980 to actually have some kind of meaningful impact
00:05:16.080 back to the grid?
00:05:17.760 Could you produce the gear in a way that would be
00:05:22.060 ROI positive from a upfront cost versus energy production?
00:05:26.500 And could you create the toys or the park elements
00:05:30.860 in a way that would be interesting to a two and three
00:05:33.000 and four, five whatever year old kid?
00:05:35.900 Those were the assumptions and when I asked them
00:05:38.080 to rank them, oh and could you sell it to the government
00:05:41.340 which if you've ever sold to government or K-12,
00:05:44.000 those are very tough markets.
00:05:45.580 It's possible, I have a lot of friends that have done it.
00:05:47.180 I've coached some entrepreneurs on making that attack plan,
00:05:51.120 but tough.
00:05:52.480 If you didn't make the list of assumptions
00:05:55.120 and start thinking about validating it,
00:05:56.860 then you're gonna have a hard time.
00:05:57.960 And that is the fifth step in the whole process,
00:06:00.460 which is validation.
00:06:01.820 There's two ways that I'm gonna share with you.
00:06:04.060 This is the absolutely fastest way to validate an idea.
00:06:07.760 One is to reach out to an expert, right?
00:06:09.900 So for example, I'm sitting there with these kids and I say,
00:06:11.740 have you reached out to an engineer that builds parks,
00:06:15.200 that designs parks for, you know,
00:06:17.500 municipalities or neighborhoods or whatever?
00:06:19.800 Have you talked to anybody that designs parks?
00:06:21.580 They say, no.
00:06:22.680 Okay, that's interesting.
00:06:24.240 Because I'm sure if you reached out to them,
00:06:26.080 they would have some ideas around cost, product, materials,
00:06:31.660 regulations, requirements for maintenance
00:06:35.320 and other aspects of a park design.
00:06:38.800 And to me, experts that are in the field
00:06:41.360 are the fastest way to start validating
00:06:43.380 some of your riskiest assumptions.
00:06:44.500 The second one is to run experiments.
00:06:46.380 And running experiments is saying, okay, it's with no code.
00:06:49.440 It's saying, this is what I think people are gonna do.
00:06:51.980 How do I simulate that behavior and see if,
00:06:55.280 out of 100 people that I put that in front of,
00:06:57.680 they take action and do the right behavior.
00:06:59.820 Or directionally speaking, enough people do it.
00:07:02.420 But the key is to define the parameters
00:07:04.420 and the expected outcomes before you run the experiment,
00:07:07.100 which is a hypothesis.
00:07:08.200 So experts, experiments, that is the fifth step in really,
00:07:12.740 truly testing your idea.
00:07:13.900 So starting off, you need to make sure you start with the
00:07:16.880 assumption that you're wrong and then I'm gonna share with
00:07:18.840 you guys a big myth and something you have to stop doing.
00:07:23.020 The second thing is list all of your assumptions that you
00:07:26.120 might have, try to group them into categories.
00:07:28.320 Number three, the categories are marketing, customers,
00:07:31.920 the technology, the cost of things.
00:07:34.460 So just start thinking about that.
00:07:36.120 Then prioritize them, like this, to make sure that they're put
00:07:40.260 in the right order.
00:07:41.600 And then finally validate using one of two strategies.
00:07:44.360 One is the experts, the second is to run experiments.
00:07:48.300 And the thing, the tip that I need you guys to do is get out
00:07:52.840 of the building.
00:07:53.680 Too many people hide behind email, blog comments,
00:07:57.940 Quora threads, Twitter discussions.
00:08:01.340 The true validation happens H to H. 0.89
00:08:04.620 human-to-human interactions, conversations in person.
00:08:07.920 Yes, you can schedule a meeting over the phone,
00:08:09.920 but get in the car, drive there,
00:08:11.520 ask your parents to drive you if you're one of those kids.
00:08:14.460 And I thought it was fascinating.
00:08:15.800 I didn't want to poo-poo their idea, 0.99
00:08:17.900 but I mean, take a few steps to really get to the crux
00:08:21.240 of the business model.
00:08:22.240 So, with that, I want to challenge you
00:08:24.800 to live a bigger life and a bigger business,
00:08:26.880 and I'll see you next Monday.
00:08:28.580 If you're still watching, it means you kind of
00:08:30.640 enjoyed the video, so if so, subscribe to my channel,
00:08:33.180 But more importantly, join my newsletter where I share other
00:08:36.360 exclusive videos and training and events that I invite people
00:08:40.360 to in contests.
00:08:41.920 Oh yeah.
00:08:43.220 And if you're ready to keep going, I've got two other videos
00:08:45.260 ready for you right there.
00:08:46.920 See you next week.