How I: Validated my idea in 2 days (with no code) Video Lecture | "How I" by Google Developers - IT & Software

[MUSIC PLAYING]
My name's Peter Lewis.
And I make voxup.co.uk, which
is a social enterprise that
helps residents who
live in a neighborhood
to discover local topics, give
their opinions on those topics,
and get responses
from their elected
representatives like
local councillors.
Before we write a single
line of code on voXup,
we were confident that our
fundamental idea would work.
We had a bunch of users already.
And among those users
was our first customer.
In this video, I'm
going to tell you
how to validate your
idea in just two days.
If you want to copy our
approach, here's what to do.
First up, think at a
really fundamental level
what value your product
provides to your users.
Try to ignore the
90% of cool features
that you thought of
in the first five
minutes of having had the idea.
In our case, there was a forum
where people were already
discussing local
topics-- the local pub.
So we went to the pub,
armed with a sign that said,
we'll buy you a drink
if you test our app.
Of course, the wasn't
any app at this stage.
But we asked people,
what would you
change about your neighborhood?
They told us some things.
And we also asked them what
they thought of the topics
that their neighbors had
already surfaced for us.
We were able to simulate
all of this by hand.
And in fact, that's exactly what
the first touchpoint of voXup
does today.
What we ended up with was
a list of local topics
that people cared
about, and a list
of phone numbers of the
people who cared about them.
So we were able to go to
our local councillor armed
with this list, and
then get responses
that we could send to the
residents in our neighborhood.
If you're thinking of
making something online,
it'll almost certainly be
handling information that's
already flowing through
a forum, either by email,
or an online forum, or
Twitter, or even in real life.
So you can do the processing
that your product does
by hand for a few simple cases.
And you can complete, in our
case, the feedback loops,
back to residents without
writing a single line of code.
In our case, we took
our list of opinions
and we looked up a local
councillor's email address
on the council website.
We sent him the list,
and we asked him
for a response on
some of the topics
that we'd already
gathered opinions on.
Once we got the response, we
sent SMS messages, by hand,
to each of the people that
we talked to in the pub.
And we said to them, what do
you think of this response?
Is it a good response
or a bad response?
When they started replying
to the text messages
that we'd sent, we'd
validated that people
cared about getting a
response to the topics
that they'd said they
were interested in.
The final thing is that you
can get the best feedback
by going out of the building
and talking to your users
face-to-face.
In our case, we've now written
about 100,000 lines of code.
voXup works at a
national scale with all
of these steps
completely automated.
But the best
feedback we ever got
was from showing a really early
prototype to our first users.
In that way we were
able to get feedback
not on which was their
favorite shade of blue, but
whether or not they valued
getting feedback on the topics
that they said they
were interested
in from their local
representatives.
These steps that I've
described replicate
each of the key touchpoints
that voXup recreates today.
So although voXup is
online and very scalable,
everything that it
does is possible to do
with scraps of paper,
text messages, and trips
to your local pub.