If you’ve been reading the O’Daily recently, you already know.

Building tech is NOT the first step to start tech company.

Wait. Whaaaaaa?

In fact, sometimes having strong tech skills can hurt you because it’s easy to over-build.  

(Unless you’re Seth Radman - follow his LinkedIn and newsletter for awesome content on how to build products customers love!)

So, what does work?

Step 1: Test authentic demand (resources & real world examples)

How painful is the problem?
Will people sign up?
Will they take follow up steps?

Step 2: Learn what to build

You know there’s a big market and significant pain
What actually solves the problem?
How do customers want this to work?

We’ve seen a lot of successful tech company start scrappy — without tech — and we follow this process ourselves in the Atlanta Ventures Studio.

Here are 4 specific, real world ways to hone your tech product without engineering resources or actual software!  

4 Ways To Test Your Tech Idea — Without Tech!

1. Community

Build a community of ideal customers through content and events. Get feedback on ideas, track trends, and understand pain points.

Salesloft tested 3 different product ideas within their sales community before landing on their sales engagement platform of today. Kyle Porter shares the story here.

2. Consult

Sell consulting or services that will later be automated via technology. Another way to think about it — fund your company through paid customer discovery!  

Unboxt knew exactly the product their customers wanted because they did in depth consulting work on the problem prior to launching.

AdPipe automated and scaled motion-first marketing — aka what the founders were doing manually for customers through their video production firm.

3. Manual

Do the work of a “product” manually on the backend. Use a form or simple front end as the customer interface.

Carpool Logistics started with a spreadsheet! It’s now a multi-app system for car transporters and dealerships.

4. Mockups

Create product mockups and get feedback. Walk through them with ideal customers. What would they change? What isn’t easy enough?

Iterate until they say, “THAT. I will pay you for THAT. And here’s my money.” 😁 🦄 🚀

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What other non-technical ways can you fine tune your product? Any early stories to share?

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