There's another technique that you can use in addition to or instead of the spoof landing pages method: the concierge method.

The concierge model is very closely aligned with the lean prototyping we talked about in the previous chapter. The basic principle is that before you actually build software, you should try to fake the service and manually carry out each user request.

Let's consider another example from the real world. We decided to build our own product, PingPong, to help users gather feedback and conduct interviews. The technology behind the product is not incredibly complex but it nevertheless will require a decent investment into design and development in order to launch a strong product. Elements of the business model, like invoicing and billing, will need to be figured out. We'll also need to build a product which is secure and reliable enough to allow lots of users to sign up and run their tests. There's a lot of work that goes into a successful product and at this early stage, we still have a lot of unvalidated assumptions about what users really want.

Instead of going all out and building a service that users can sign up for directly and use, we'll go the concierge route. Thus, the only way for paying customers to sign up for now is for them to agree that we'll manually fulfill their order. Eventually, the product will take over and perform these tasks automatically. Of course, there is always the risk that a manual service won't be able to scale with the demand and you'll have to turn down customers; while this is a whole other problem for you to tackle, rest assured that you've hit upon a crucial problem.

This can feel like a huge time commitment, but in fact, this is critical learning. We manually run the service at the beginning and build deep relationships with our first few customers. Since we're communicating with them a lot, we ask them questions about their needs and expectations and use their feedback to fine-tune our business model before we build out the full product. This is a great way to validate exactly what users will be willing to pay for and maximize user value.

As an additional bonus, operating as a concierge can mean that you're making money right from day one!