Lean shortcuts, fast results

How to take shortcuts when implementing lean experiments for your startup. With real world use case.

Everybody and their cat are trying to implement some of the lean startup principles. The gist is simple and attractive: experiment, see what works and what does not then iterate to optimise the first. Simple right? Right, indeed it is that simple.

This mean building at least, a MVP… But this can be sometimes too slow. You have to build it to test it, right? Wrong! There is a faster way to test your ideas.

I’m gonna reveal you how we are doing it at Breezup.

The problem

You need an MVP in order to test it. So you need to build the underlying infrastructure for that MVP to work. Then you test it with some early adopters and see if it works as you expected. This process can be long, may take weeks or months depending on the time and resources you have to invest on it.

Unfortunately at Breezup we don’t have time and certainly the resources are very limited, that’s why we decided to take shortcuts to try our ideas and see people’s reaction to it. With amazing results. I know a lot of people in the community are in the same situation, that’s why I’m glad to give back my experience and maybe it will help you reach your goals quickly.

Modus operandi

You have an idea that you’ll will like to test with a MVP. To see if it works, if people really need that, if your assumptions and research are correct. You have the concept, have described, sketched, even designed maybe. And you are ready to build it!

The development will take you a couple weeks… Not good, you need results now! As quickly as possible so you can validate the idea or move on to the next one.

How about this? You skip all the development and jump directly to the end result of it.

How does that sound? Crazy right! Now listen…

Yes, you can do it, in fact we did and we collect a great amount of important data to decide what to do next. Without investing much time developing an MVP with all that goes with it.

We takes the shortcut, you can do it too

It is very easy, describe the core of your idea and define the end result. In our case one of the experiments was like this: We have a place where the coolest fashion articles are shown. So this is the place you go to see what are the latest trendy articles right now. That is the end result, a simple page with a list of trendy fashionable articles, simple.

How the articles make their way to the page is other story, for that we have like 10 ideas around it, those ideas are too in testing fase, of course.

Now you have defined the end result, you just need to build it!

So we did, very simple, one HTML page, with a list of trendy products on it. I looks like this: Breezup Fashion Trends.

Test your assumptions

Now you are ready to see how users react to your page. How you reach those users is subject of other post. Stay tuned at Breezup blog.

We unleash 1000s users to the page and measure what they did on our page. For that we had clearly defined what we want to measure. Most important indicator was the CTR of the page, since that’s key to the success of this particular idea.

Finally

Test your ideas this way. But if you have the resources and time just go ahead and build the MVP. From it you can collect much more data than for only one simple HTML page.

Hope this small insight from our experience on Breezup will help you reach your goals quickly.

Don’t hesitate to contact me if you have anything to say. Feedback is really appreciated.

Godspeed