Hi everyone,
I was wondering if anyone here in this forum has applied Eric Ries “Lean Strategy” principles to get validated learning during his app/service/products development with Xojo?
I think Xojo is ideal for this and rapid prototyping. Here are some of my ideas on how it can be applied (I haven’t tried it yet but will soon, so please give feedback if you think I’m wrong or right):
- Fake Landing page - smoke screens
This principle should be easy to do in Xojo. Just setup a Web project and create two or more different versions and then randomly guide your visitors to the A/B landing pages you want to test
- MVP
A MVP doesn’t necessary needs to have the functionality, actually it’s best to fake it first (as part of your validated learning), so the amount of coding to fake it needs to be at a minimum. Setting up a local Web app and directly traffic to it via a DDNS service (which constantly points to your local IP given by your provider) seems the easiest way to deploy your app. It also allows you to very quickly deploy and updated version, as you go through the learn-measure-deploy cycle many times even per day!
How do you tackle the problem of keeping your data persistent when you don’t want to program any API calls to a SQL or NoSQL database? Easy, just define some arrays, write everything in it (best is even keep the info in JSON nowadays) and store them locally on your test machine. Deploy a new version of your app and restore from disc with all the existing data to avoid generating it over and over.
- Testing and getting feedback
Putting a button that implies to take the customer (or future customer) to a new feature can easily programmed by just popping a message box with “This feature will come soon. Thanks for displaying your interest in it” or something along the line to give positive feedback to your customer that you’re recognising their demand and you’re working on fulfilling it (or not yet).
How do you track this feedback best? Maybe in the beginning it’s wise to just trigger an email with from Xojo with some identification of the customer and what action he intended to use (in case you test more than one new feature). Remember, the plan is to get validated learning fast and in an easy way
- Customer surveys
In case you want to ask the customer some information that they are willing to share (to identify market/product match eg) it’s again just a group of radio buttons (in case they can only give one answer) or your allow multiple answers and maybe even the option of a free text field below to enter their own answer if they don’t feel their answer is presented. Again, this feedback can trigger an email that you send every time someone answers it back to your email.
What do you think? Anything that you would do different from the approach highlighted?
What have you done in a similar case?
Any info can give all us a higher chance of succeeding with our ideas in the future.
Thanks a lot,
Andreas