Free tool & method for testing startup ideas
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Trevor Owens

Javelin by Lean Startup Machine - All-in-one platform for building products people want

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Stacks Accelerator
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Javelin helps you test startup ideas with potential customers and gives you data to guide your decisions. Record and transcribe customer interviews, test landing pages, and use pre-designed surveys to analyze the most important feedback.

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Trevor Owens
Maker
Thanks everyone for checking out Javelin! Would love to answer any questions you have. Making innovative products is difficult. You have to find the right early adopters and solve the right problems in the correct way. Having a business plan is not enough. You need to go out into the real world and talk with your customers to understand who they are and what is causing their current problems. Javelin connects you with customers to interview, while also providing you with tools that make recording, organizing, and analyzing their feedback simple and easy. Setting up a landing page to test your idea isn’t very difficult, but with Javelin, we take this concept a step further. Javelin gives you the ability to test multiple landing pages, track multiple customer acquisition channels, and compare your website copy and conversion rates, in order to provide you with a clear vision to which path will make you and your idea the most successful. On top of all of these features, once you begin your beta testing, Javelin can measure if your product is a MUST HAVE, (hand gesture or tone change) something that people can’t live without, or a NICE TO HAVE, meaning it will be difficult to scale.
Abadesi
@to Do the testing strategies work for every type of startup? e.g. tech for good?
Grace Ng
Maker
@to @abadesi Yes, this is a methodology and process that works for any idea. We help connect you to potential customers to interview, help you analyze the interview data and calculate the business metrics for different ideas so you can easily decide which customer to focus on, which is the biggest problem to address, and which is the best solution to solve it.
Tricia Fitzgerald
@to Does your testing work in any other country outside of the US? We're in New Zealand and it's a different market.
Trevor Owens
Maker
@tricia_fitzgerald Hi Tricia, you can use Javelin anywhere in the world. For the On-Demand Interviews, there are many customers in the database in the Australia/New Zealand area. I'm not sure the exact number offhand but I will look into it for you! Also--we don't have the ability to target by location yet, but that will be coming very soon.
Zeeshan Ejaz Bhatti
@tricia_fitzgerald @to I am from NZ and using it just fine.
Michael Gold

Trevor and Grace are well known experts in bringing products from idea to market. This software allows companies to leverage their knowledge and insights at scale.

I was an early beta user of this product and have worked with Trevor and Grace since 2012.

Looking forward to seeing the next generation of great ideas and business models that are developed now that Javelin has reached 1.0.

Pros:

If you're looking for a low risk way to test new product innovations, Javelin gives you a framework designed by experts.

Cons:

It will be even more powerful with lots of users. So sign up :)

Grace Ng
Maker
Thanks Michael!
Grace Ng
Maker
Hi everyone, thanks for checking out Javelin! Javelin is a platform that guides you through turning your ideas into successful new startups. This is based on our experience teaching entrepreneurs for the past 8 years. It's been a tough journey to figure out how to simplify the startup process into tools that anyone can use, but we finally did it! We're making Javelin super useful to entrepreneurs building their products and would love your feedback on how to improve it. Go ahead, start using it today for free!
Shuken

The hardest part for any startup I've built or worked with is finding paying users and fully validating your idea. It's not enough to have some paying users if you have never explored other customer segments and their pain points. You may not be servicing the largest pain point and the largest potential customer segment. I can not stress how this issue of building product in the wrong direction is, it can turn a great team, and a decent product into a failure.

For me it took years until I went through the lean startup machine to see how focused product validation helps. It's the opportunity cost of building product and spending time on something people don't want that scares me the most.

Javelin is the combination startup lessons and failures into a working model for startups. The teachings are in almost every accelerator in the world and javelin is here to bring this to everyone for free.

It's not enough to know what you want to build. Your customers need to want your idea, and want to pay for it. I've see this problem over and over again. Pushing though our own ego lets you build the best version of the product. This process of pushing beyond what you think, in to what you know is what the Javelin process does. This is what lean means for a startup. Our best intentions can divert our focus away from the prize, away from cash flow. This is why I love this process and I know it will help many people all over the world.

Pros:

Validating customers who love your product before you build or invest too much is invaluable. It's incredible that this is free to use now

Cons:

Waited forever for something like this, so happy it's here.

Alex Miller
Super slick ui. What were your hypotheses and how did you guys go about validating them for this product?
Trevor Owens
Maker
@fotoflo we started out with the hypothesis that people wanted help DESIGNING experiments, that was our first product (the old Javelin) which we raised $1.5M and signed several big enterprise customers. It turned out that was not true, because almost no one used that product on an ongoing basis. Then we tried to validate if people wanted help RUNNING experiments, this was through a new product called QuickMVP which was a landing page builder. That product took off right away, but in the end it didn't provide enough value. Thousands of people invalidated their ideas but they didn't get enough feedback from customers, they didn't know how to pivot or what to do next. So we did a Zoom-Out Pivot to focus on the current Javelin. Actually, at this time we ran out of money so it was a really difficult period. With the new Javelin we focused heavily on helping people do customer interviews before launching a landing page test. It's taken us a couple years to get to this point since we ran out of funding, but here we are and we are proud of what we have built! The feedback has been super positive and we are also using the new Javelin to pilot our own pre-accelerator with SOSV (the #1 most active early stage investor globally).
Alex Miller
@to so to be clear, the current hypothesis is that people want help doing customer interviews AND launching landing page tests?
Trevor Owens
Maker
@fotoflo "People want help with the heavy lifting of conducting customer interviews, validating their solution, and measuring/tracking Product/Market Fit" Essentially, they want in all-in-one tool that helps simplify the process of going from idea to product/market fit. We also validating this from a solution standpoint with the video you see above and a landing page test... but this was a few years ago. It took us a long time to get the UX and frontend of the product to be where it is now. I also have an unfair advantage which is that I started Lean Startup Machine for myself and have always been the #1 customer. This is part of the reason why I think it was successful. For QuickMVP, it wasn't something I would use from beginning to end for my own ideas. I would have done interviews first. My first test for Javelin is to have it pass my own test. It's not quite there yet but should be there soon after we iron out the kinks in this pilot.
Trevor Owens
Maker
@fotoflo just did a full blog post on all of our learnings/efforts for the past 5 years: https://medium.com/startup-grind...
Muneeb
Big fan of the team! I'm recommending this to startups who're building decentralized apps on the Blockstack platform.
Grace Ng
Maker
@muneeb Thanks Muneeb!
Trevor Owens
Maker
@muneeb Thank you Muneeb. An honor to have praise from an entrepreneur like you! Amazing to see the growth of Blockstack. If only I had liquidity back in 2013!
Jan Smejkal
This product can be a game-changer for thousands and millions of entrepreneurs worldwide... well done, team Javelin.com!
Trevor Owens
Maker
@jsmejky thanks Jan, this is EXACTLY what we hope to see Javelin accomplish!
Mijael Feldman Sabah
Incredible product! This is leveling the ground for entrepreneurs everywhere!
Grace Ng
Maker
@mijael_feldman_sabah YES! Making it easier for entrepreneurs. Keep the feedback coming!
Trevor Owens
Maker
@mijael_feldman_sabah Thank you Mijael!
Tom Lev
Congrats Trevor and Grace!
Grace Ng
Maker
@tkornblit Thanks Tom!
Trevor Owens
Maker
@tkornblit Thanks Tom!
Ray Wu

I've tried the previous iteration of Javelin and I didn't stick. I'm constantly doing interviews, and I really dig the new structured approach to formulate assumptions and interview directions.

Pros:

It's like having a guide to help you fill out the assumptions you want to test

Cons:

I have not gone through the entire interview cycle to have an informed opinion

Trevor Owens
Maker
Thanks Ray! Your feedback going forward would be invaluable for helping us take it to the next level.
Grace Ng
Maker
Thanks Ray! Let us know your feedback anytime
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