/ How a Bottle of Wine Helped Us Validate Our First App

How do you get early customer feedback on your new app when you don't have customers yet? We used a bottle of wine.

This was early days of our bookkeeping app Albert. We needed real behaviours and reactions on our app but didn't have users yet. So I brought a bottle of wine to a few industry meetups in London and made a deal with the other attendees:

• → Guess the price of the bottle
• → Download our app Albert
• → Send me an invoice with the app for your guessed amount
• → Closest guess wins the wine

Silly? Maybe. But surprisingly close to real-world use (except for the wine ;-)). The app was designed for creating invoices quickly, on the move, sitting next to strangers. That's exactly what this recreated.

After the game, I asked a few simple questions: First impression? Would you use this again? What worried you? Those conversations uncovered issues no data dashboard would have shown us.

The insights led directly to our first onboarding redesign and highlighted the importance of some features we initially did not consider of the same importance. For example, customisation of the invoice numbering format to the customer's own format was hugely important for people who would consider switching to Albert.

If a few people from your test group highlight the same issue, you can count on the fact that it is going to be an issue for a larger group of customers as well. Better address it.

Sometimes the best research doesn't need a lab or big budgets. It needs a decent Malbec and a room of curious people willing to play along.

I've written about this and dozens of other simple but impactful tactics in Pocket Winners, my upcoming book on the mindset required to build apps people genuinely can't live without.