The lean startup model is pretty smart—you get your product out in the public as quickly as possible, smooth out the bugs, get feedback, and keep building so that in a year you’ll have a market-tested, user-approved product. But what about those who want to test their startup before they invest and launch? It’s definitely possible, and here’s some top testing tips and tactics to prove it.
Buy Your Keywords, Drive Traffic
SEO, social media, content marketing and press outreach are all uber important to develop before, during, and after your product launches. But did you know, you can buy keywords through PPC simply by bringing up an AdWords account and a Bing account which will drive traffic from the search results to your webpage?
Of course, you’ll need a functional page but it doesn’t necessarily have to work just yet. The key is to see how many people are actually interested in the product and visit the site. This is an excellent starting off point for mapping user potential. So make sure you…
Create a Beta Launch Page
What is a beta launch page you might ask? It’s a teaser or a little taste of what your product will be. You want to ask the viewer to sign up to get an email invite and leave feedback or answer a few survey questions (a-la a host from Google or Survey Monkey)
This is an awesome and reasonably cheap way to test the response from your target market, and to fix bugs you wouldn’t otherwise know about. To known this vital info before you invest is gold.
Start Doing the Social Media Reach
Blog, tweet, create viral content and get those surveys out to your friends or a beta test list. Check out Mechanical Turk and FIVERR for helpful tips on this. Create surveys with different headlines and content, and see which one gets the best feedback, and go with that. You can use the survey data to significantly increase your viral impact.
Buy your Feedback Army
There are some awesome tools out there to help you find pre-launch product testers. These people can test your landing page and its performance, usability of the website, etc.
Check out Feedback Army and Silverback app. You can also buy users on FIVERR (for, you guessed it, a fiver) who can perform tasks like running through the whole app, and fill out specific feedback pieces.
Feedback is your Friend
Don’t worry about full launch feedbsiack. There are plenty of ways to test your product upfront before the big public debut. Using these pre-test tips might just save you a lot of time, energy and investment.
So, hit up your friends, buy some keywords and gather an online tester army to get the essential feedback before your startup is let out in the wild.
