Show it to fans before you spend a season building it

Why do good ideas still flop?

CB Insights studied 431 VC-backed companies that shut down since 2023. Running out of capital was the final cause for 70% of them, but underneath it, 43% had poor product-market fit. Many built something well; it just wasn't something enough people wanted. For rights holders that cost shows up twice, once in the build budget and again in the sponsor deck, where an unused app or an empty fan zone is hard to sell.

Rights holders make the same mistake with fan products. McKinsey found only around 50% of companies did user research before generating their first design ideas, and almost 60% used prototypes only for internal testing, late in development. That's how a product reaches launch day without a fan ever seeing it. Yet companies in the top quartile for design grew revenue 32 percentage points faster than their industry peers over five years. Doing design well mostly comes down to testing.

The cheapest feature you'll ever build is the one a fan talked you out of.

Testing in public, from football to museums

One of football's most visible technology changes of recent years was tested in public before it went global. FIFA tried semi-automated offside technology at the FIFA Arab Cup 2021 in Qatar, alongside internal tests of an in-stadium fan app. It then ran it at the FIFA Club World Cup in Abu Dhabi in February 2022, showing fans 3D animations of decisions on the big screen and on broadcasts. Notice the sequence: two live tournaments before the global stage. In our team's experience at FIFA, the technology went on to cut offside errors from 15% to under 1%. And at the FIFA Club World Cup 2025, three organisations selected through FIFA's innovation portal piloted fan-engagement technology live.

Music streaming shows what the habit looks like at scale. Spotify runs more than 250 tests a year on its Home screen alone. That's one screen, which tells you how routine testing is there. Museums got there early too. The Exploratorium in San Francisco turns ideas into physical prototypes and tests them on the museum floor, because how visitors really use an exhibit often differs from what designers assume.

Cheaper than you'd think

Nielsen Norman Group found that a first study with five participants uncovered 85% of usability problems. So five fans, one afternoon and a rough prototype will tell you more than a month of internal meetings. A printed mock-up at a fan zone, a clickable demo on a tablet at the turnstiles or a test message to a few members all count.

None of this needs much money. The hard part is the discipline to show something unfinished to the people you most want to impress, and a standing fan panel makes that routine. Season-ticket holders, members, festival regulars and museum friends are usually glad to be asked, and teams that build the habit spend more of their budget on features fans actually use. Over time, those sessions add up to a real understanding of your fans, and nothing tells you more reliably which digital activations deserve the next budget.