Design your Product

Dan Thiffault, Head of Product and Engineering at Tern, discusses the components of a good hypothesis test.

Dan Thiffault discusses how Dropbox and Zappos validated their solutions before building a product. Dropbox created a 3-minute video showing how their product works and shared it with 10,000 customers who had initially signed up on their landing page. Zappos took pictures of shoes at retailers and shared it on their website to validate their business model.

Dan Thiffault discusses Groupon’s concierge MVP (minimum viable product). Groupon used a website form to get interest from users for events and when they had enough interest for a particular event, they would manually email a groupon to everyone.

Dan Thiffault discusses when you should run tests to validate your startup idea. Dan suggests using these testing strategies from the time you select your target market to developing an MVP to even after you’re running a successful business to keep learning from your customer.

Dan Thiffault discusses how Buffer used landing pages to validate their value proposition before developing a product. The idea behind Buffer was to create a way to queue up tweets without scheduling each tweet individually.

Dan Thiffault discusses Wolfgang von Kempelen’s chess concierge MVP (minimum viable product) in 1770. Dan suggests using a concierge MVP prior to investing significant time and resources in solving a complex problem.

Dan Thiffault discusses how Tripadvisor applied 404 tests to decide which product feature to build next. 404 is the code you get back from the web-browser when you click on a link to a page that doesn’t exist. Tripadvisor had feature options as links on their webpage before actually building the most popular features.

Dan Thiffault suggests using surveys before using landing page tests to learn more about your target market and validate your hypothesis.