Testing Your Product and Getting Feedback

为什么会有这种 纯英文格式的文章呢？

平时有很多碎片化时间，比如下班的地铁上，或者等待的时间，我们总喜欢拿出手机玩，这个时间也可以用来学习呢，当然佳爷自己也想学习英语，所以上下班的时间看看。

To figure out if an idea is as good as we think it is, we have to talk to our customers. We have to ask them what they like, dislike, want, or need, and we want honest feedback about our product or service.

As entrepreneurs, we’re creative problem solvers willing to take risks for our ideas — and this is part of that risk-taking. We have to be the boldest versions of ourselves to send out surveys, conduct interviews, and give presentations to end up with the best business idea possible. These conversation strategies are useful for the whole entrepreneurship process — from our initial idea to 2 years in.

But feedback in these early stages informs all kinds of crucial decisions, and some of the trickiest customer interactions are getting people interested in our product or service in the first place.

First, we want to pull out the value proposition and review how we expect to provide value to customers. This will help us come up with questions and explain our minimum viable product. The goal of this stage in the process is putting our MVP through validation, or initial tests before launching.

Next, we have to decide what exactly we want feedback on because we don’t want to waste everyone’s precious time by asking unfocused questions. Is it a physical product that people need to get their hands on? Is it a website that people need to click through? Is it software that we need to demo?

And now we have to actually get people to give us feedback! This early stage is where we have to really embody that “hustle” we keep talking about. Steve Blank, famed entrepreneur and author of The Startup Owner’s Manual, says, “Get out of the building.” But that doesn’t necessarily mean run-up to the first person we see on the street and bombard them with questions… usually we like to use a more tailored approach! One easy place to start is with our networks.

Friends and family are a good place to make sure your questions make sense and will get you the type of feedback you’re looking for. But we need to go beyond them because we want unbiased opinions about our ideas. You probably know more people than you think, like work colleagues, friends of friends, or LinkedIn connections! Talking to them will give you a chance to practice before talking to complete strangers.

Surveys are flexible ways to get lots of responses on whatever key metrics we’re interested in. Some people basically have degrees in designing effective and informative surveys.

But there are 3 key sections we want to focus on:

1. Target Market

Open with a few demographic and behavioral questions to get a sense of who the person is and what their life is like. This helps contextualize their answers and informs our marketing decisions.

2. Demand

We’ve checked out the competition, but what do other people have to say? Do they already use a competing product? Are we battling fierce brand loyalty?

3. Willingness to pay

We think our idea is worth a million bucks, but how much do other people think it’s worth? After all, they’re (hopefully) doing the buying.

Getting Surveys Filled

It’s really easy to create and deploy surveys. If you’re going digital, you can use templates from services like Survey Monkey, Type Form, and Survey Hero, or make one from scratch.

You can ask your network to take your survey by sending emails directly to your friends and colleagues. Branch out even more by asking them to pass your survey on to 5 people in their network — but make it as easy as possible! In that initial message, include language that they can easily copy and paste.

In the age of social media, consider posting a link to your survey on Twitter, Facebook, or even Instagram. You can tag people to try gaining some traction — that personal touch can help persuade people to fill it out. And we do still live in a physical world, so you can conduct surveys IRL too!

Phones still make calls. Shocking, I know. So you can ask people questions while you take notes.

It’s also not too cliche to pick a busy street corner and ask passersby a few questions, especially if they’re within your target market. If you’re nervous, try bringing some exuberant friends with you who can help break the ice. You could even ask a non-competitive business owner with a similar target market if they would let you survey their customers either in-store or by email. You can sweeten the deal by offering to include a few questions that make sense for their business.

If we want more depth than a survey can offer, focus groups and interviews are a good strategy. The key difference is that we can watch people use our product and ask follow-up questions to really understand their experience.

Some schools of thought recommend asking “why?” five times when solving a problem, to get to the heart of an issue. Although, for the record, you should mix it up with actual full questions, not just “why?” like a 3-year-old. Sometimes you may want to approach someone specific that you only sort of know or you haven’t met before. Now, we’re not encouraging stalking — use common sense, never make anyone feel unsafe, and be respectful of their time.

But say you’re looking to sell a new alumni directory app to universities and scholarship programs. And maybe you’re having trouble getting in contact with the alumni coordinator by phone or email. So you can try showing up to their office during business hours with a kind smile and a reasonable ask. Your basic goal is to get in the door, talk with an important potential user, describe your project snappily, and try to build a relationship. That way, maybe you can conduct a test, have a deeper conversation later, or even land them as a customer. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but taking these kinds of risks can be part of the “hustle”!

Focus groups and interviews take more time and don’t have the same reach as a survey. But the feedback can help you figure out what really needs to change, or what people truly like.

Today it’s more common to demo software than vacuums, but the idea’s the same. With this method, we test our MVP with people or businesses — basically, anyone who has purchasing authority and could buy it. The goal is to understand where we could make big improvements to the user experience, before officially launching.

Notice for all of these strategies, we need large groups of people willing to listen to our ideas. If you’re having trouble finding them, universities and colleges, entrepreneurial advocate groups, networking groups, and Startup Weekends can help! Connections at each of these places can fundamentally change your progress, support, and feedback. Once we have a pile of information about our MVP, our work is only half done.

Next, we have to sift through it all and sort the valuable feedback from people being grumps. Ideally, we want to use the power of math to help. Surveys especially give great data for statistical analysis, but we can use any method to get helpful quantitative and qualitative feedback.

Quantitative feedback involves numbers — things like rating our product or service on a 5-point scale (1 being the worst, 5 being the best) or asking how much someone would be willing to pay for it. Calculating the average response to these questions is often a good start.

Qualitative feedback is basically everything else — people’s meandering thoughts about what they liked or didn’t like. We can analyze the results by grouping answers into several categories like “fun,” “complicated,” or “ugly shade of green” and noticing how often those categories show up.

In general, we want to collect information from a meaningful chunk of our customer base — a statistically viable sample. We should try to have at least 100 responses, but more responses lead to more useful results. Ultimately, we want to use every drop of information we’ve collected to recognize all the opportunities to improve our MVP. But we have to take some feedback with a grain of salt. We’re really looking for trends in the data.

After we’ve sifted through to find the golden nuggets of feedback, we need to actually modify our MVP to increase the value we’re providing to our customers. We could make minor design tweaks, or completely scrap features to focus on one aspect that people love —Pivot! We want to make sure our future customers get what they’re paying for.

The bottom line is: are people going to buy whatever you’re selling? We hope the answer is yes, but validating our idea by testing and gathering feedback will help us make sure before we go all-in.