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.

A social network where you had to implicitly prove that you provided value to people before you were connected with them.  Everyone of your “friends” was guaranteed to have listened to your advice, in a meaningful way, at least once in the past.

The growing fragmentation of social networks seems to show that people have different tools for tending to their core/aspirational audience (RSS/4sq for me); their broader but relevant audience (RSS/Twitter/FB for me); and their “signal” audience (the people they want to denote social relationships with — LinkedIn and Facebook for me).

What tends to happen with successful social networks is that they have a core value to the first user and some incentives to connect with friends (LinkedIn, for example, is a great place to store your resume in a web friendly way, and becomes more valuable with better social proof).

Facebook’s got a broad ownership of your entire social graph (how you connect broadly to companies, products, people); if you want to build a social network, don’t compete on the broader data play — what niche information can you get detail and clarity on that users or marketers care about?

I’d find a network of the people that you actually influence to be useful as your friend (linkedin fails at this for me right now).

What other more clearly defined data would be a valuable asset to build?