Dry Testing: 3-Steps to Determining Market Viability

Do you have an idea for a new product or service you just know people are going to love?  Before you spend months (or years) of your time and thousands of dollars of capital, why not first do some dry testing.

The purpose of dry testing is to measure the interest level for your product at a certain price point.  In a dry test you set up a site where you act like the product is already available, but just before someone is able to buy, you redirect them to a page telling them the product is not yet available.  Then you can ask them to sign up to be notified when it hits the market.

Dry testing is a bit shady if you carry it too far.  As soon as you know there is interest — let’s say on “page 2″ of your site — you need to let people know the product is not yet available.  You definitely don’t want to get someone’s credit card info unless you will actually ship the product within 30 days.   (There’s laws against that.)

This isn’t just for completely original product ideas.  You may already be committed to build your new business, but you want to know which features most resonate with your market.  Your dry test would then be an A/B test for various product features to see which capture the most interest.  You can do the same with different price points.

Here’s how to set up your dry test:

1. Set up a landing page in Unbounce highlighting your product or service.  Put a big call-to-action button on the page.  This page will register a “conversion action” when someone clicks this button.
2. Create another page in Unbounce where you put a message such as, “Sorry, this product is not yet available.  Please enter your name & email below to be put on the waiting list.”  This page will then have a form (supplied by Unbounce) that records name & email.
3. Direct traffic to this page.  Google AdWords works best — it is quick and targeted.  This $75  in free advertising coupon may still work.
4. Track your results.  Consider email signups as sales.  How many email signups did you get?  How much did you pay in advertising?  With some optimizations, could you make this work?

Benefits of dry testing:

The obvious benefit is that you have a better idea if there’s a profitable market for a new product or service before wasting time and money building it.  But there are also some other related benefits…

• When you have a new idea that is complex or costly to build, it is easy to get discouraged because of all the risk involved.  Dry testing will enable you to expand your horizons and take on bigger challenges  – which could bring bigger paydays.
• If you’re trying to get others on board to fund your idea, you’ll have a much better chance if they can see the names of the actual people who would have purchased your product if only it had been built.

You want to put your best foot forward in your dry test.  If you need guidance, contact me.