Validating Your App Idea Before Building

Transcript

1. Validating Your App Idea Before Building Build mobile apps your users are happy to pay for
2. Hi! I’m Fei (@feifanw) I’m a iOS & web developer.
 I help iOS developers make better apps.
3. Why do you want to validate ideas before building?
4. Building quality apps is hard
5. It can be like gambling
7. An alternative approach
8. Say no to building fancy features, say yes to solving user’s problems
9. How I became passionate about this topic
10. I did it as a consultant Case study
11. And now I do it for myself core15.co and write about it after SecretSaucehq.com
12. 7 Steps to 
 Product Validation
13. 1. Identifying a customer segment
14. Be niche
15. They have problems you can relate to (empathy)
16. 2. Find a painful or itchy problem
17. Painful–something they’ll pay for
18. Itchy–build habits around your app
19. 3. Validate that the problem is real
20. Interviews
21. Smoke tests
22. Landing page experiment
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24. Content experiment (blog, podcasting)
25. Using paid ads to drive traffic
26. Crunches Planks Bicycle kicks Breather The Core Focus Time left 11:30 02:30 Tired of planning your ab workouts? Facebook ad
27. It’s all about finding a signal
28. 4. Figure out how they are currently solving the problem
29. What other apps are they using?
30. Do they even use apps?
31. What do they like/dislike about existing solutions?
32. Interviews
33. Online forums (reddit, Quora, Facebook groups)
34. 5. Prototype solutions & get feedback
35. Keep the prototypes rough
38. 6. Validate your marketing channels - how will you get people through the door?
39. Can you scalably, consistently, and profitably get installs?
40. “Spend 50% of your time on product and 50% on traction.”
41. 7. Building an early access list, use it as beta list AND interview candidates
42. Stay in touch with your early adopters
44. 8. [BONUS] Build a MVP beta, refine your way to a finished product with direct feedback
45. Use TestFlight
46. Be hungry for data
47. Learn more at boombox.io
48. Recap
49. 1. Identifying a customer segment 2. Finding a painful or itchy problem 3. Validating that the problem is real 4. Figuring out how they are currently solving it? 5. Prototyping solutions & get feedback 6. Validating your marketing channels - how will you get people through the door? 7. Building an early access list, use it as beta list AND interview candidates 8. [BONUS] Build a MVP beta, refine your way to a finished product with direct feedback
50. Case study
51. Spruce tryspruce.com post.adobe.com
53. “I LOVE it! I manage many different accounts for businesses and this is extremely helpful, a huge time saver, well designed and fun to use! Thank you Adobe, you did it again!” “If you're not satisfied with clumsy and oversimplified post-construction when you can't settle down for a detailed design, Adobe has added Post, which quickly and seamlessly stitches together work from the rest of mobile/cc for professional and customizable posts for most all social media platforms.”
54. It all started when…
55. Client says…
57. What he really meant was…
58. Non-pros who needed to consistently communicate online…
59. Visually…
60. Must make
62. Our target market
63. Social media managers at SMB’s without design support
64. We did 15 interviews…
65. We invalidated infographics
66. Most people didn't know what an infographic was
67. The data & facts for Infographics took too long to prepare
68. Jenny Our persona
69. Posts to 3 or more platforms
70. 3 to 10 posts per day
71. Twitter was a constant
72. Twitter was most frequently posted
74. Problem
 Creating sharable graphics for Twitter quickly was difficult
75. We set out to figure out if the problem was real and if our solution solved it
76. Our solution
77. A Twitter image creator specialized in text over image
78. Let’s make something!
79. Fake it till you make it
80. Learning Goal Are people interested in Twitter graphics? If so, what type?
81. Took one day to setup
83. People were requesting, but not posting
84. They needed faster feedback loop
85. Build the MVP
86. The web is a better prototyping platform
93. Listen to your users AND your data
97. Pablo by Buffer Spruce
99. Q&A
100. Thank you! Find the slides at: SecretSauceHQ.com/iosremoteconf