Inspirational

A friend of mine just asked me for some advice on sending surveys. This is the list I came up with.

Sending surveys is an important part of early customer development; it helps you test a hypothesis and delivers you “perception” data. You can track how a user interacts with your service, it’s harder to track how they perceive it without surveys.

Early on in development of a consumer facing product, I’d recommend sending out simple surveys at short intervals (1-4 weeks) to a subset of your userbase. Below is the advice I gave my friend, if I’m missing anything: submit it here.

Read this: http://startup-marketing.com/free-customer-development-help-surveyio/

Here’s my advice:

- Order your survey intentionally. Use early questions as eventual filters. i.e. if your second question is “how bad would you feel if you couldn’t use this product” that helps you sort later questions (i.e. my power users think this is the key feature, everyone else thinks it’s something else).

- When evaluating the data, you don’t want to optimize for the largest segment, you want to optimize for the segment that’s most engaged.

- Don’t ask any questions without understanding how you’d apply the data you’re collecting.

- Ask some open ended questions. I like to have less than half my questions require typing — and it’s usually just an “anything else you think we should know?”.  But, open-ended questions are really useful for messaging exercises and for early “discovery” surveys. Check out the survey.io survey for an example. Those questions also allow you to learn alot more about the user (and how committed they are to helping — you can tell a lot from the length and quality of their response).

- Ask for the ability to phone followup, and do phone followups with every possible person, develop deeper relationships with potential customers.

- Provide an option for opting-in to the “elites” club — let them self select into beta testing groups. These elites can often become marketing assets. Yelp did a great job of this. David Barrett at Expensify is also doing this well right now.

- Short surveys = win.  <10 questions. <5 mins to complete.  half that is much better.