Article · ~12 min read

Fake Door Testing: What It Is and How to Run One

Learning Loop Free Beginner

A clean, practical playbook for the mechanics: where to place the door, what to measure, and how to avoid annoying the people who walk through it. It covers the in product version (a button for a feature you have not built) alongside the standalone landing page, so you see both shapes of the test. Good for turning the concept into a concrete plan you can ship this week.

  • The door can be a button inside an existing product, not only a new page
  • Decide your success metric and sample size before you launch
  • Show a graceful coming soon message so testers do not feel tricked
Open on learningloop.io ↗

It answers 4 questions

  1. How do I run a landing-page / 'fake-door' test?
  2. How do I actually validate my idea with a no-code prototype before I sink weeks into building the real thing?
  3. How do I test whether people will actually pay, not just say they like it?
  4. Is a waitlist with a lot of signups actual proof of demand?

Read with it

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  2. The permission slip to recruit users by hand, do things manually, and deliver 'insanely great' experiences to your first few... paulgraham.com Essay · ~15 min read Do Things That Don't Scale Paul Graham
  3. Video · ~25 min How to Talk to Users Eric Migicovsky
  4. This is the founder essay that made the case for validating before you build, from the person who did it with Buffer. Gascoigne... Medium (Joel Gascoigne, co-founder of Buffer) Essay How to successfully validate your idea with a Landing Page MVP Joel Gascoigne
  5. This is the most concrete walkthrough of how to test a niche when you have nothing built yet: put up a page describing the... kromatic.com Essay · ~15 min read Fake Door / Smoke Test Kromatic (The Real Startup Book)
  6. Michael Seibel, who ran YC, makes the blunt case for shipping something almost embarrassingly simple and learning from real... Y Combinator Startup Library Video · ~10 min video How to Build an MVP Michael Seibel
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