Test an idea out with no-code

What is it:

Sonoraspace.com A virtual piano festival

What did I learn:

1. Product Strategy: Stand up a landing page before creating the product. Sonoraspace has done this here with their current product.

I highly recommend that you create a landing page as soon as possible regarding your product or service. And start collecting emails on the page for those people that are interesting. Part of building in the open is that through time you will collect an audience of interested people for your product. This isn't a strong validation signal, but if you can get email sign ups, that is far greater value to you than followers on Twitter/social network.

Once you have these users, you can offer behind the scenes looks and ask product questions. These are going to be a group of folks who have self selected to see more because they are interested. You do not want to wait until you have launched the product to reach back and let them know that it is ready. Early adopters love to treated differently. Keep them in the loop with whats going on, and ask for feedback because it is a perk that they can shape the product and get a customized experience.

Remember, to launch something lean, your feedback between you and the user/customer has to be short. As short as possible so that you make something people will pay for.

Get feedback is a gift especially when you build in the open. Not only do you create a much smaller feedback loop, but you also get investment from those people. When they give input to your product or service they become invested in the success of it. They will want to see you succeed. This is how you can get your first product advocates that love your product and tell other people about it.

There is a monetary benefit to deploying this tactic as well. In my experience 10% of my early sign ups purchased The Lean Side Project. I had almost 200 pre-signs ups. This is great! It really gave my product a strong start when I launched it open for folks to try beta.

2. No-code tool feature: Typeform is used for sign up for artists. This is a great tool to use to grab information from your user. I would recommend that using Airtable forms might be better used in this situation. I like the way Airtable connects to the Airtable base and makes it easier to categorize the data that you get from the form. Typeform is missing this and it's an extra step to export the data from Typeform into a flat file like a CSV. Now you could have a task done with Zapier to connect to Airtable and export it automatically, however that is a lot of extra work, unneeded complication and cost.

Airtable forms can be designed minimally to not be that different from your page. I would recommend that you link to Airtable as a separate page so the design doesn't look to invasive.

3. No-code tool feature: "Streamyard is a live streaming studio in your browser. Interview guests, share your screen, and much more. Stream directly to Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and other platforms." I recently did a product tearndown for Rebel Book Club and they are using a similar feature called Hopin. Generally these tools are used for streaming presentations in the browser or used in a community for large numbers of people to consume.