Question
We have an idea to do a Social "Stress" app, where people can sign up as strangers and meet someone in their same "stressed" mode, like I was fired by my boss today and I find someone who did as well, and we are both Chatting about it. It'll also bring up some comedy for both of us and will be a "social stress reliever". Now obviously the idea is very 'wild', how do I "Test the waters" to see if this could be of an interest to users?
Answer
The best way to do validation on this idea would be to acquire customers through Facebook ads (rich targeting makes you able to cohort users nicely). Then, you could manually pair people via email or through a simple text messaging exchange facilitated by Twilio. In this scenario, you could prompt them to take the actions you think will be at the core of your app's functionality. Observing their engagement rate and what they do with each other would give you some insight into how viable this is.
Happy to talk this through in a call with you. I've helped a lot of clarity members through similar customer development exercises.
