When we founded our first product, EasyBib, in high school, my friend and I wanted to introduce the service as soon as possible. We understood firsthand as students that doing a bibliography was a total pain, and that we can automate citation generation with a website. Our friends and teachers said that they would use the service, too.

So we worked every day after school and over the weekend building EasyBib. I have fond memories of working out of my friend and business partner Darshans childhood room, brainstorming how the site would work, and actually building it out.

After two months, we had a version of EasyBib that did just enough. It could cite a few sources and compile a bibliography. We showed it to our teachers and friends, and as we had hoped, they loved it and used it. Moreover, they found EasyBib valuable enough where they started to tell others about the service.

In retrospect, much of what we did followed lean startup principles. We tackled a problem we acutely faced. We received qualitative feedback from our peers and teachers to make sure that this was indeed a problem, and that EasyBib was a solution that people would use. And we a built a product just good enough, in lean startup terms a minimum viable product (MVP), that people could use and found valuable enough to tell their friends.

Our next product

That was in 2001. Fast forward to today, and EasyBib has over 40 million users, and we have acquired two similar properties with another 30 million users.

Our dream, though, has always been to build a larger company under our legal name, Imagine Easy Solutions, that can launch successful products from conception to implementation. So in March 2013, we decided to build a new product called GetCourse.

Through our experience in education technology, we witnessed the power of massive open online courses (MOOCs). We thought, lets build a solution that makes it insanely easy to create such online courses that we could use ourselves for internal and customer training.

Trying to get lean the second time around

In the spirit of being lean, we discussed the idea with friends and showed them very basic wireframes. Some told us they could use a product like that, and others told us they saw a good product market fit for intuitive and simple online course creation.

Originally posted here:

5 Steps To Test Your Product Idea And Get Clear Results