One of the drawbacks of working on your own is that you don’t have the same access to colleagues to bounce ideas off. And, work that isn’t peer-reviewed is often not as strong as it could be.

For example, over the last few weeks I’ve been learning about iOS development and I built a prototype of a very simple app (just to see if I could). The app basically displays random, and dirty, pickup lines that guys could use in bars. I spent a fair amount of time designing a nice pink icon with hearts all over it, and a beautifully pink gradient background and used a script font to display the text. When I was finished I thought, “Wow, that looks pretty good.”

I showed it to my wife and she said, “Yes, honey that looks good!”

I showed it to my friend and he said, “Looks good buddy.”

I was feeling pretty confident and good about myself. I had conquered building an app (albeit a very simple one) and people thought it looked good. Gold star for me.

Then, I sent a test version to a colleague.

“What do you think?” I probed.

*pause*

“Well, it looks kind of girly. And, it seems the target market is men who would use cheesy pickup lines.” my colleague replied.

In my head I thought,  for just a split second I thought, “Did he just call my baby ugly?”

But then I realized that he was right. The way the app looked was totally targeted at the wrong folks. How did I not see this? Why was I so stupid? Oh the horror.

The point of my story is that great work (and great marketing) doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You need to test and get real feedback from your customers and colleagues.

Sometimes it can be as simple as just talking to your customers. Other times you might want a well-designed survey tool.

But for sure, you need to give people a real chance to tell you your ‘baby is ugly’.

Hint: A Facebook page could be used just as much for customer feedback as it could be for marketing.