Method category: Evaluative market experiment

How to Use This in GLIDR

You can use an Event Smoke Test to figure out a lot of information about your users face-to-face in a more scalable way than individual interviews. 

In GLIDR, you should run an Experiment with a targeted goal and metric that you want to hit with your event. Then, follow the outline below to plan out an event and gather data from attendees. Put the survey data, information about the event (like number of attendees), and qualitative information from discussions with attendees in Evidence that you attach to the Experiment. In the Analyze phase, determine if this test succeeded or failed and reflect on what you learned from the event.

Learn more about each of those aspects of GLIDR:

Article excerpted from The Real Startup Book
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You can use an event to smoke test a problem, and to some extent, content that is attractive for your target audience. By organizing an event, you are confirming that your audience has the expected pain points. If you charge for the event, you are confirming they are willing to pay to solve their problem. And if you are ultimately creating a digital product, it can be used to smoke test the content or process you'd like to deliver digitally.

Organizing an event speeds up your validated learning by scaling it up one step above one-to-one interviews. The goal is to create a safe and fun environment for your target prospects, in order to confirm what you've learned from individual problem and solution interviews.

An event allows you to create a product for your target market. By organizing one, you need to figure out how to reach your target market, what to say exactly, and how to create an experience that they find useful, pleasant, or inspiring.

The choice of format can vary widely:

This type of smoke test is easiest to organize in a larger city, where there are already lots of events and people. Even though an event focuses on your target clients in one location, it can be used to establish a more in-depth relationship, giving you much more information than interacting online.

Events themselves are attractive as a low upfront investment product. They can be considered valuable content. They can be used as a source of highly qualified leads (or a way to test a channel), leading into an upsell or presell of a different product/service.

Because an event is a mini-product in and of itself, it can be used to test a number of different hypotheses around related business models. Most frequently, events help with scaling up exploratory customer discovery. They help the most with exploring customers and problems. They can also be combined with other techniques, like basic landing page smoke tests (with a minimum audience size to confirm there is enough interest in the audience). Also they can be considered or combined with a concierge MVP, where the event is combined with delivering a service.

Most evening events will take 5-10 hours to organize. This will usually be enough for validation purposes. The biggest "time suck" tends to be finding a venue, particularly if you want to run a specific type of event. The event itself typically lasts 1-3 hours. The key is to make it long enough to seem valuable to the target audience.

Breaks during the event are critical. They give participants time to network, go to the bathroom, and eat or drink anything you've provided. They help consolidate anything learned. From a validation POV, breaks provide you with unstructured time to interview your target audience.

Because you can use events to prove many kinds of hypotheses, it's critical to be clear what you want to learn and why it's important for you--before you start organizing the event. As long as there is a clear cutoff value formulated upfront, you will find it easy to use events as a source of validation.

If using events specifically as smoke tests, you don't want to oversell the event. If your goal is to determine if there is demand around a problem, you should sell enough to make sure that the proposition is clear and easy to buy. However, a very hard sales push will distort your results. For example, if you are using:

You won't know if you are getting a clear indicator there is high demand, or if you are just a good salesperson.