Smoke Testing: 5 Steps to Quickly Validate Your Ideas

Whether you’re building products or marketing campaigns, time and money are precious commodities. There’s a lot of pressure to make the right decision the first time. Experimentation is important, but no one wants to try and fail for a year until they find something that actually moves them toward their goals.

This is where smoke testing becomes invaluable. By providing quick and early feedback on your ideas, functions, or products, smoke testing allows you to validate concepts without diving headlong into full-scale development. This helps you make informed decisions and reduce the risk of costly mistakes.

In this article, we’ll explore how smoke testing can be your secret weapon for launching new initiatives with confidence.

What is Smoke Testing?

Smoke testing is a process where you test the basic functionality of an idea or product before implementing it fully. The goal is to capture valuable feedback before investing time and money in developing something for real.

If your test passes, you can move to the build phase with confidence. If your test fails, you can abandon the project without having spent a lot of time and money on it. Smoke testing also goes by the name confidence testing or validation testing.

“In the world of growth marketing, smoke testing is one of the most cost-effective and efficient ways to test newly formed ideas,” says Emir Atli of Indie Hackers. “It helps you to validate your idea. Smoke tests can even preempt the MVP concept.”

For example, suppose an online media site wants to implement a “snooze my subscription” feature, but they don’t know if it will actually stop people from canceling. Instead of building out the full functionality on their site, they add a button and measure its clicks.

The button doesn’t do anything, of course (though maybe it takes them to a simple page that says “this feature is coming soon”), but the number of clicks helps the company understand how many people would consider using such a feature.

Origin of the Name “Smoke Testing”

We don’t know exactly where the term came from, but there are two potential origin stories.

One possible origin comes from the plumbing industry, where smoke was (and sometimes still is) used to test for leaks and cracks in pipes. It’s a quick way to identify the problem.

Another possible origin comes from hardware testing, where devices are initially switched on and tested for signs of smoke in their components.

It’s hard to say if either is true, but it’s evolved into a widely used term in software development. Smoke testing is a subset of tests used to assess if a software build is stable enough for the next development stage. Specifically, it identifies any bugs blocking the release of a product.

In classic marketing fashion, growth teams have adopted and redefined smoke testing as a quick tool to validate ideas. This is the context in which we’ll be using it today.

Why Do Marketers and Product Managers Use Smoke Tests?

The beauty of smoke testing is that it provides quick validation without requiring significant resources. You can find out if an initiative has genuine interest or demand before you develop it.

Naturally, this means that smoke tests save time and money. By testing the waters with a basic version or even just a concept, you can gauge user interest without diving into a full-scale development project. It also reduces risk, so you can abandon ideas that don’t resonate with your audience before you’ve spent too much.

Feedback is another benefit. When you put a preliminary idea out there, you can quickly learn what potential users think and feel about it. This expands your knowledge about your customers, which helps you refine or design future products.

Smoke tests are also great tools for prioritizing features. If your resources are limited, it’s important to focus on what will bring the most value. Smoke testing tells you which features or products are worth pursuing so you can better allocate resources.

Smoke Testing Use Cases

That’s enough theory! Let’s talk about some practical cases where smoke testing would make sense. In each of these use cases, smoke testing helps you minimize risk, validate or invalidate assumptions, and ensure that you’re on the right track before committing significant resources.

New Business Ideas

Instead of going all-in and investing heavily in a new venture, you can test the basic functionality with a simple landing page or ad campaign to gauge interest. For example, if you want to open a subscription box service for pet owners, you could create a basic webpage outlining your service and see how many people sign up for updates or express interest.

You can even take it a step further and let people checkout on that landing page without a product ready for sale. This often gets pushback from digital leaders, but the biggest and most successful products are out there doing it every day. Here is a great real-world example from Masterclass, shared by Josh Lachkovic.

After paying for a language learning product they were promoting, he received a message that it was not actually available for use yet. Specifically, the product is “going through further research and development.” The takeaway for Lachkovic is that digital leaders should take cues from leading companies and not let the fear of disappointing customers prevent them from validating or invalidating their ideas before investing.

Smoke testing lets you collect preliminary data on potential demand. You might refine your business model or pivot your idea based on the response. This helps you avoid the cost and mistake of developing a business that doesn’t have a place in the market.

Minimum Viable Product Launches

Smoke testing is a great step right before or after a minimum viable product (MVP) launch. An MVP is the simplest version of a product that you use to test assumptions and is an important part of lean product design.

Suppose you have an idea for a new productivity app. Instead of building all the features you envision, you can start with one or two core features that provide the most value to your intended audience. No bells, whistles, or polished interfaces. This is your MVP.

Once you get a few users, you then track their engagement, gather feedback, and determine whether the MVP meets a real need. This validates whether the MVP provides value to users. Plus, based on user feedback, you prioritize additional features.

Product Feature Ideas

When you’re developing a product, coming up with new features can be exciting, but not all ideas will resonate with users. Smoke testing lets you test the appeal of potential features before full implementation.

Consider a company that develops software for freelancers. They’ve identified a common problem: freelancers struggle with tracking billable hours. To address this, the company proposes a new feature in their app that automatically tracks time spent on different projects and generates reports.

Before fully developing this feature, the company can run a smoke test by creating a basic version of the time-tracking tool. They offer it to a select group of freelancers for feedback – ideally, the ones most likely to use it and provide commentary.

The company then gathers data and feedback to see if the feature actually solves the freelancers’ time management issues, if it has any major issues, and if any refinements are necessary. This ensures that the solution is tailored to real user needs.

Buy-in from Stakeholders

Convincing stakeholders to support new initiatives can be challenging, especially when they involve risk. Smoke testing can help validate your hypotheses and build a compelling case for stakeholders.

For instance, suppose you want to offer a subscription product on your site to generate more revenue, but your leadership doesn’t think your customers will buy it. You could create a subscription landing page for the product, but when users click the “buy now” button, they’re directed to a “coming soon” page with an opportunity to sign up.

By presenting data and results from this smoke test, you can provide tangible evidence to back up your claims, making it easier to secure buy-in and resources from stakeholders.

Before Major Releases

If you’re like many brands, you don’t have unlimited resources to try everything. You have to identify what works quickly. A smoke test is a great way to validate your idea or feature before you push it out to your entire audience. This will help you avoid expensive or embarrassing situations.

5 Steps of the Smoke Testing Process

Fortunately, the simplicity of smoke testing means setting one up is quite straightforward. Let’s walk through the steps of creating your own smoke test.

Step 1: Establish your acceptance criteria

Every good business decision starts with opportunity sizing. By understanding the criteria for your go/no-go decision, you’ll have clear terms for how the outcomes of your smoke test will determine the next steps.

Here are some examples of acceptance criteria:

• If we can collect contact information from more than X% of webinar attendees within the first X weeks, it will be worth investing in a full-scale online course.
• If we generate $X in pre-orders for the new product within X weeks, it will be worth proceeding with large-scale production.
• If we increase the open rate of our newsletter by X% after implementing personalized content, it will be worth investing in further personalization technology.

Step 2: Design a Simple Experiment

Your next step is to build an experiment. Keep in mind, however, that this should be a simple test.

For instance, you might create a landing page for a new product to collect pre-orders. You would build something quick-and-dirty, though still presentable.

“One of the most accurate ways to test a product page is to actually collect customer payments, even before the product has been built, ” says Dayana Mayfield of DevSquad. “Some of the best digital product creators will launch a page, drive Facebook and Instagram ad traffic to it, and then refund anyone who purchased and let them know that the product isn’t ready, but they’ll let them know if and when it becomes available. This way, the entrepreneur can review their return on ad spend (ROAS) and make sure that the campaign and product are profitable before deciding to move forward.”

Step 3: Drive Traffic to Your Experiment

With your test in place, the next step is to put it in front of your audience. How you do this will depend on the nature of your test and who you expect to interact with it.

For instance, if you’re testing a new feature on a product detail page, it will be seen by people who visit the page organically. You wouldn’t need to take any steps to drive traffic. If you have a way to contact your current users or customers, you can push them to the page directly.

But if your test requires a brand new landing page, you’ll have to take steps to get the right kind of people on it. Eric Ries, the founder of Long-Term Stock Exchange and author of The Lean Startup, recommends putting some ad dollars behind your smoke tests.

“If you want to build an online service, and you don’t test it with a fake AdWords campaign ahead of time, you’re crazy. That’s the conclusion I’ve come to after watching tons of online products fail for a complete lack of customers.”

Choose a maximum daily budget that works for you and let it run for a few weeks. No more than 100 clicks per day is all it takes to get enough data.

Step 4: Launch Your Smoke Test & Track Engagement

You’re ready to hit go on your smoke test! Now it’s time to let it run and keep and collect data according to your success criteria.

While you track the engagement, you may develop new ideas or ways to iterate and improve the feature/product you are testing. Document those ideas so that you can run additional experiments or adjust this one to better inform decisions.

Step 5: Make Your Decision

Your final step is to decide whether the results warrant going forward with your idea. Hopefully, you have as much data as possible to support your decision, but that isn’t always the case. Sometimes, you have to make a judgment call.

In some cases, your results may not be 100% conclusive, but you might decide to do an additional smoke test with a little more effort.

For instance, suppose you added a “subscribe and save” link to all of your products to see how many people are interested. But this doesn’t tell you how many would actually buy.

Instead of rolling out subscription capability to every product in your store, you might offer actual subscriptions for a small group of select products. If that sells well, you can roll it out site-wide.

But don’t spend a lot of time making your decisions! This is the time to be fast and decisive.

“It can be tempting to keep iterating and re-examining waning results, but don’t fall into that trap,” says Jeroen van den Boom, Chief Venture Strategy Officer at Bundl. “Stay unbiased, clear-headed, and let the data guide your decision-making process. You’ll either: 1) Move forward with a validated concept, 2) Make some necessary adjustments before re-testing, or 3) Cut your losses and move on to the next project.”

Smoke Testing: Get User Feedback Before Implementation

Before diving into the development of any new project, it’s always smart to gather feedback and validate your ideas. Smoke testing offers a practical and efficient way to test the waters before you commit resources.

This is a great ethos for optimization in general. It doesn’t take building out your ideas in full to give you proof (or at least some evidence) that it will work.

At The Good, we specialize in helping businesses optimize their digital products through strategic testing and validation. Let us guide you in making informed, confident decisions that drive your product’s success. Contact us to learn how we can support your journey to delivering exceptional digital experiences.