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[MUSIC PLAYING] My name's Peter Lewis. And I make voxup.co.uk, which is a social enterprise that helps residents who live in a neighborhood to discover local topics, give their opinions on those topics, and get responses from their elected representatives like local councillors. Before we write a single line of code on voXup, we were confident that our fundamental idea would work. We had a bunch of users already. And among those users was our first customer. In this video, I'm going to tell you how to validate your idea in just two days. If you want to copy our approach, here's what to do. First up, think at a really fundamental level what value your product provides to your users. Try to ignore the 90% of cool features that you thought of in the first five minutes of having had the idea. In our case, there was a forum where people were already discussing local topics-- the local pub. So we went to the pub, armed with a sign that said, we'll buy you a drink if you test our app. Of course, the wasn't any app at this stage. But we asked people, what would you change about your neighborhood? They told us some things. And we also asked them what they thought of the topics that their neighbors had already surfaced for us. We were able to simulate all of this by hand. And in fact, that's exactly what the first touchpoint of voXup does today. What we ended up with was a list of local topics that people cared about, and a list of phone numbers of the people who cared about them. So we were able to go to our local councillor armed with this list, and then get responses that we could send to the residents in our neighborhood. If you're thinking of making something online, it'll almost certainly be handling information that's already flowing through a forum, either by email, or an online forum, or Twitter, or even in real life. So you can do the processing that your product does by hand for a few simple cases. And you can complete, in our case, the feedback loops, back to residents without writing a single line of code. In our case, we took our list of opinions and we looked up a local councillor's email address on the council website. We sent him the list, and we asked him for a response on some of the topics that we'd already gathered opinions on. Once we got the response, we sent SMS messages, by hand, to each of the people that we talked to in the pub. And we said to them, what do you think of this response? Is it a good response or a bad response? When they started replying to the text messages that we'd sent, we'd validated that people cared about getting a response to the topics that they'd said they were interested in. The final thing is that you can get the best feedback by going out of the building and talking to your users face-to-face. In our case, we've now written about 100,000 lines of code. voXup works at a national scale with all of these steps completely automated. But the best feedback we ever got was from showing a really early prototype to our first users. In that way we were able to get feedback not on which was their favorite shade of blue, but whether or not they valued getting feedback on the topics that they said they were interested in from their local representatives. These steps that I've described replicate each of the key touchpoints that voXup recreates today. So although voXup is online and very scalable, everything that it does is possible to do with scraps of paper, text messages, and trips to your local pub.