The Importance of Testing
Business guys that are trying to get into the startup game are a dime a dozen.
That’s why is so important to filter through the ones that are all talk, no action.
Sure you could probably validate them through references, previous positions held & how well they performed at those.
However, why not just create a simple project to test a couple of basic abilities you would expect from a good business co-founder:
- To drive potential customers to the product.
- To manage all marketing & sales efforts.
- To discover potential opportunities: partnerships, new products etc.
Defining the Project
Since you don’t necessarily want to waste vast amounts of your time developing a web app that only serves one purpose, to test your potential partner, I suggest building something trivial.
In our case, we decided to build a quiz, mainly due to its instant gratification nature.
Now the only question was, what will the quiz be about?
Since we knew that in the future we’d be building web apps for the fitness industry we decided on a quiz about dieting. A quick look at Google Trends told us that the Paleo Diet was the most trending one around the web at the time.
I left developing the questions to Dustin since partially I wanted to see if he’ll take the time to get familiar with the diet & come up with the questions needed for it.
Setting up the quiz took no time at all since it’s a basic CRUD style app, the score result images are pre-generated via a batch task in illustrator.
Setting Goals
At this point you want to set some kind of general goal for the project, in our case it was:
- 500 Solved Quizzes.
- Plus validating all the abilities I mentioned above.
Results
Paleo Quiz
–Social Results–
Tweets: 107
Likes: 137
Solved Quizzes: 1,252
–Google Analytics–
Unique Visitors: 1,849
Bounce Rate: 41.85%
% New Visits: 81.71%
–Top 6 Referrals–
Facebook.com – 654
Reddit.com – 214
T.co – 201
Tumblr.com – 142
m.Facebook.com – 125
Digg.com – 51
Even though the results, by all means, aren’t spectacular, we’re are pretty satisfied with how it turned out.
More importantly, I was able to find someone I would love to work on future projects without hesitation that he can’t deliver.
Found a cofounder through first testing him on a simple project.