Making a Side Project, Part 12: Testing
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Does it work?
Have you read Part 11 of the Making a Side Project series?
Last night I setup the AWS services that I need to deploy Deaton.
I decided to keep things simple since I only have a couple of days until the end of the hackathon. I setup an EC2 instance (via Forge) and an RDS MySQL server. Made sure everything was in the same VPC so they could talk to each other. Connected my Gitlab repo to the site, and crossed my fingers.
Deaton is now live, and soft launched. Under normal circumstance no one would know, and no one would care, but building in the open means that a few people have already signed up and started tracking their projects. 🎉 🎉 🎉
Now that the MUP is complete the next step is normally to get some early adopters into the application to try it out. I prefer this to be people I know that I can talk to. To get real frank and honest feedback.
I also prefer that people don’t know too much about the app. I want them to be like my target user coming to the website not knowing anything before hand. I want the website to be able to tell them what it is and what it does. If they are not able to figure that out from the website then how would other users. Might be a little big difficult here since most people I know have been following my posts and know what I’m doing already!
If you don’t know anyone what would be a good fit, then it is time to start tapping the email list that you’ve hopefully been growing.
Look over the list at the domains of the email addresses find to someone that works somewhere that might be client, based on what the company does.
Still no obvious targets to email, time to pick 10–20 users as random from the list, that’s right don’t email everyone yet. For this 10–20 you want to send a personal email, offer to do a call if they prefer to be walked thru the product.
After you send the emails, keep a close eye on the web server analytics, see when and how people are visiting the website, track what they are doing, before they even…
