How to validate this app? Is it even possible?
The app idea is simple. One can easily and simply invite his friends to hangout with couple of clicks.
It's something between Facebook Events (creating event, inviting friends is a bigger task and commitment) and group chats where you just text people to come.
Simple example
Imagine you are sitting at your favorite coffee place working with your laptop on your stuff and you are there regularly. From time to time friends are stopping by to say hi, if they know that you are there. Every time you can let them know by simply texting them, but it gets tiresome with time. With this app you can simply select your favorite group and noncommittally invite them. They get notified and they know you are there.
I've started to do this app anyway because I wanted to learn Flutter and this was perfect side-project to do it.
But I wonder, how one can validate this idea without building a product? I can't manually do this for people as the whole idea is based on the fact that it's super simple and fast when doing this within the app. The same reason why Snapchat is so popular -- because it's so easy to send anything within seconds. Is it even possible to validate it without MVP?
Anybody here would like to test the app after, of course, coronavirus times?
Hey Filipp, I love this idea! excited to follow your progress. As for how to validate it, I could be wrong, but you might be thinking of validation the wrong way.
Validation isn't binary, an idea isn't "validated" or "not validated". It's more like a range.
On one end, you have 0 evidence that this is a good idea, and on the other you have 100, that is, overwhelming, high quality evidence that it is.
The ways you can validate this idea aren't different from the way you would do it for any other software product. Smoke tests, prototypes, landing page, customer development, etc.
You won't get to 100, but that doesn't happen for anyone until they release their product, and it's not the point of the process.
The point is to gather evidence as efficiently as possible, and that's rarely by spending months building the product.
I like the idea of 0->100 validation and different approaches. That totally makes sense and gives broader look at the whole validation idea.
That's an awesome response, thank you!