Nine days to a live market test

On a Monday, a senior stakeholder looked at six months of discovery work and said: “Do a market test.” Not “start planning a market test.” Do one.

Nine days later we had two landing page variants live, each targeting a different persona. Full data capture. Copy informed by three user interviews. A clear decision framework with criteria for go, pivot, or kill. And a two-week window to get our answer.

I partnered with a marketing colleague who had already done competitive research and persona development. They designed the validation strategy; I built and shipped the execution end-to-end. Neither of us could have done both in nine days.

While the landing page copy was being drafted, we were running user interviews and findings went straight into the copy. The third interview changed a headline.

We had no engineering team, no design system, no CMS, so I built static HTML pages with PostHog for behavior and a Google Sheets backend for email capture. The whole stack came together in hours instead of weeks because the goal was learning, not polish.

Before the pages went live, we wrote down what the numbers would mean. Above a certain threshold, go. Below another, kill. In between, one sprint extension, max. The pre-committed criteria kept us honest when the read came back ambiguous.

What we built was a question, not a product or prototype: will strangers give us their email based on this value proposition? Everything that didn’t serve that question got cut.

Everything we’d heard so far had been from people connected to us, friendly audiences. The smoke test targeted strangers who found us through organic posts and paid ads. If they signed up, that was a different kind of signal than a warm interview participant saying “yeah, I’d use this.”