The best way to validate a product without launching it is to try and simulate what the experience would be like when it's fully populated with content and users.
Virtually every product development cycle goes through this timeline:
Day 1: This is going to be huge
Day 30: This is terrible. What were we thinking?
Day 90: Oh wait, this adjacent idea is actually the good one.
The only times where I've accelerated this timeline is when I have clarity of what users should see when it's launched. Something you thought might be interesting may not actually be that great in practice.
I was building a map-based app called Ants that showed you in real-time where crowds were forming in your area—so you could see where the hottest things were happening.
After building it, I realized that people clustered in the same places almost every day and it didn't provide any new information on the 2nd session.
All along I didn't need to build the app to get this insight. I could've populated a map with the data right onto a Figma file and anticipated this outcome much sooner.
Virtually every product development cycle goes through this timeline:
Day 1: This is going to be huge
Day 30: This is terrible. What were we thinking?
Day 90: Oh wait, this adjacent idea is actually the good one.
The only times where I've accelerated this timeline is when I have clarity of what users should see when it's launched. Something you thought might be interesting may not actually be that great in practice.
I was building a map-based app called Ants that showed you in real-time where crowds were forming in your area—so you could see where the hottest things were happening.
After building it, I realized that people clustered in the same places almost every day and it didn't provide any new information on the 2nd session.
All along I didn't need to build the app to get this insight. I could've populated a map with the data right onto a Figma file and anticipated this outcome much sooner.
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