How would you quickly prototype/test a service that usually takes place over several months?

Depends on your objective. If you really just want to know whether the idea is viable, you'll get the most bang for your buck by keeping things email-capture-only or putting up a "smoke test" where you have a Buy Now button that redirects to a "it's not available yet; but leave your email if you want to be notified when it's ready"... and see if you can get anyone to click "buy now" by clearly articulating on your landing page what the product will do for them. This also lets you test pricing sensitivity. If you can't get anyone to leave an email or click "buy now" based on a really good description with images (or even better a video "demo") then building the actual product is unlikely to be worth it.

It really depends on what you're building here. If you can do any part of your product manually, I would suggest doing that in the first version. The absolute fastest way is to hire a contractor to get it done, but that can be expensive. If your first prototype can't be built with a prototyping tool (even a Keynote presentation) and it's too expensive or difficult to build on your own, you have to convince other people that you are solving an important problem, that your solution solves that problem, and that you have the right team to do it. VCs in a seed round will care more about the team than the idea, but crowdfunders will care about both. And obviously getting designers or developers to join your team for equity will require convincing them of all 3. Happy to give more specific advice based on your app thrugh a Clarity call!

You can try here, there will most likely be some 'experts' in the mix of people that check it out. https://www.reddit.com/r/AlphaAndBetaUsers https://www.reddit.com/r/NewProducts Also, I would do a search through Clarity for 'wordpress' or 'video' and book a call with someone that's an expert in the field. Send a link via a Clarity message and they might have time to check it out briefly before your call, and then they can also go through it with you on the call. Other than that, you could google blogs about wordpress plugins and contact them. best of luck, Lee

You can get real people to interact on a site like usertesting.com — it's a paid service to get you real feedback from real humans. If you want access to your demographic, you'll need to find out where they hang out and come up with an offer to encourage them to try your service (a closed beta, free access in exchange for submitting evaluations and feedback, etc.). Ads and/or sponsored posts could be useful here. Or you can set up your own user testing arrangement and offer to pay people a small amount in exchange for using the app. This should probably be your last-ditch effort, though. Good luck!

Based on my own experience building indie games I'd recommend these Reddit and Slack channels for beta testing: Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AlphaAndBetaUsers https://www.reddit.com/r/playmygame https://www.reddit.com/r/indiegameswap/ https://www.reddit.com/r/freegames Slack: https://www.hamsterpad.com/chat/hashtaggaming https://www.hamsterpad.com/chat/gamedevelopment https://www.hamsterpad.com/chat/indie-game-devs Also, just give it to your friends and family and you can record their interactions with it using something like: https://www.lookback.io/ Finally, some paid options include: https://www.usertesting.com http://ubertesters.com/ https://betafamily.com/ If you want to discuss how best to design customer interviews / questionnaires for your specific app, to assess what you need to change, what to keep, etc. feel free to send me a message, best, Lee