Sending Customer Development Surveys

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.

What would this look like?

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?

Do it like Facebook

mikehudack:

gregnews:

When I was building my first business in the late-90s, a friend who I was working with on a large project gave me some sage advice: Do it like Amazon.

He explained that for any kind of decision on functionality or user interface, the default answer should be Amazon’s answer. In our case we were asking: Should we have people make usernames or just register/login with their email addresses? Amazon just does email addresses, so do that.

If you didn’t do what Amazon does, there had better be a compelling reason why not, because Amazon had the benefit of the most experienced engineers and one of the largest bases of users to test with.

Now, the web has changed a lot and Facebook is the company that’s pioneeringinternet innovation. Facebook has over 200 engineers — arguably the most experienced team in social-driven web platforms — and over 300 million users.Facebook’s testing many new changes to its site daily with large sample sizes of users, so most parts of Facebook are the way they are for a good reason.

When you’re making all the little decisions necessary at the beginning of your next web project, you might want to consider the default position: Do it like Facebook.

Now of course that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t break with Facebook’s way occasionally or even all the time. But you need to know the rules (and who’s making them) before you can break them.

How we got 18,000 beta users in 4 weeks

YES!

runitback:

We got 18,000 users in our 4-week private beta by emailing relevant bloggers demo codes for their readers.  In a Hacker News thread about getting users there were some recommendations to start your own blog and build an audience.  That sounds hard.  It’s much easier to just borrow other peoples’ audiences when you need them.

Find small blogs (10k-50k subscribers) relevant to your market and offer them 100-1000 signups with a custom-branded demo code.  The blogger likes getting an exclusive for her readers, and the readers like getting insider access to a hot new tool.  Contact a bunch of them at once, we felt lucky to have a roughly 20% hit rate.

To find these blogs you can try looking for stuff via Google blog search, although it frequently returns a lot of spam sites.  We found searching delicious tags was a better way since it’s got more of a human filter around it.

The best way to find blogs is to give personal demo codes to people who missed out on a blog code in exchange for a list of blogs they read.  This demo code application form can also get you a wealth of other market information if you ask more questions.  It was on a form like this that our users told us what our premium/pay features should be.

Keep track of the contacts at the blogs that post your demo codes.  When you launch, email them again and they’ll cover you once more.  This also results in a burst of coverage around launch so you seem to be everywhere.