founders, VC's, mentors and startup experts.
In my first startup marketing job I was given the task of attempting to call a couple hundred customers to try to rustle up a dozen or so customer references. That task opened my eyes to how important customer insight was for our startup's marketing efforts. ...
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Via: Rocket Watcher
Co-founder of RocketScope http://rocketscope.com a marketing |
We're all very well aware of Steve Jobs' contributions to technology and society. Without Steve, and Apple, we would all be using Motorola Razors or some other "cool" phone (ah, those were the days) or tablets would be just a failed Microsoft project.But there's one thing that Mr. Jobs has indirectly contributed to that I'm not a big fan of. ...
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Via: Treehouse Blog
Expert Teacher at @treehouse, husband to @hpremaratne, autho |
Listening is hard - The most obvious reason why we focus so much on monitoring and jump into analyzing is that listening is hard. ...
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Via: Conversation Agent
Sr. Director Strategy, Empathy Lab. [Make sense. Make do. Ma |
Try asking your members this. Create the thread, turn it into a sticky thread, include it in your mailing list, add your own problem, and see what response you get. ...
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Via: Feverbee
Founder FeverBee Limited - Online Community Consultancy |
A few reasons why I don't like Net Promoter (at least for us as a B2B SaaS provider) and think it shouldn't be used as a growth predictor ...
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Via: UserVoice
Head of Community @UserVoice in San Francisco, singer in the |
Wait what? INCREASED support requests? Isn't our goal at startups to reduce the support requests? After all, support requests means time taken away from developing code right? ...
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Via: Phil's Blawg
Startup guy, Founder of BudgetSimple, Soccer player, beer dr |
With the rise of social media, it's never been easier to conduct simple market research with a little bit of collaboration and creativity. Here are three simple ways that you can effectively use social media to gather market research without the resources, cost and time. ...
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Via: Likeable Media
social media enthusiast with a passion for health education, |
This has to be one of my favorite customer development tips: using Mechanical Turk to do customer interviews. Nick Soman, Founder of LikeBright, and I discuss how he used Mechanical Turk to interview 100 customers in 4 hours, and how that got him into TechStars Seattle. ...
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Entrepreneur-ish |
I've invested in hundreds of companies that have started from scratch and I've been though some crazy number of product launches, especially if you include all of the TechStars companies I've been involved with. These alphas, or betas, or v1.0 or v0.1 launches are exciting moments as they signify the transition from an idea to a product. And, it's at that point that the real work begins. ...
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Via: Feld Thoughts
I'm a managing director at Foundry Group. I live in Boulder, |
Many of us tend to get pissed the moment Facebook changes something, or Twitter adds promoted tweets, or Instagram sells itself, or Lore doesn't work. Count me among them. But are we entitled to get that upset? We receive these services for free and enjoy a multitude of benefits from using them. ...
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Via: Creativity Unbound
Marketer, Blogger, Believer in Sharing, Chief Innovation Off |
So many marketers have this received wisdom about online surveys being a great alternative because they are fast and cheap. But there is an enormous benefit to doing online surveys the right way, making an investment in all segments of your customer base, and creating a virtuous circle between the desire to share information with your brand, and the desire to spread information about your brand wi ...
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Via: BrandSavant
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At the heart of what we do is The Hypothesis. Getting the hypothesis right is the first key to validating (or invalidating) our assumptions underlying our entire startup. If you get out of the building with a bad hypothesis, you won't hear anything valuable from your customers. ...
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Via: Lean Startup Machine
product manager/designer/foodie/musician/husband/father and |
The first question you want to ask your customers is usually not the question you want answered. For some reason, our first instinct is to ask a question that is one or two or three steps removed from the actual information we want. I can't tell you why this is, but I can tell you I've seen it every time I work with someone to get user research done. ...
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Via: Cindy Alvarez
Making people more awesome through building better software. |
Anyone who works in UX has had experience of watching clients fight over "What The Users Want". Talking to your customers is one of the most important things you can do as an app developer/owner, so shouldn't it be easy? ...
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Via: The Intercom Blog
COO at @Intercom. I speak & write about UX, Customer Acquisi |
In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz's warns that giving consumers more product choices actually lowers their purchase satisfaction. Schwartz reasons that having too many options makes us fear missing out, which causes anxiety, analysis paralysis and regret. ...
I think that one of the hardest things about being an entrepreneur is figuring out who to listen to and when to take feedback on board. At the earliest stages there may well be precious few people who understand what you do well enough to provide constructive criticism ...
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Via: The Equity Kicker
I'm a VC in London |
Let's split community feedback on your products/services into two types; prompted and unprompted. Prompted feedback happens when you ask members to give you feedback. Forum questions, surveys, focus groups etc are all prompted feedback. Unprompted is when it comes up in community discussions (or complaints). ...
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Via: Feverbee
Founder FeverBee Limited - Online Community Consultancy |
Eighty percent of startups develop products they never intended, driven by the markets they never intended to enter as dictated by the consumer. Never mind that the figure - 80 percent - was anectodal and unattributed. So what if this so-called 80-20 rule is right? What do you want to do? ...
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Via: Richard R Becker
Rich at Copywrite, Ink. Editor, LiquidHip. CTO, CelebratingL |
Feedback is going to define your company at some point or another, whether you want it or not. Every single company story is one of customer feedback. Apple heard (feedback) that computers (theirs, but moreso Microsoft's) were perceived as complex and confusing. So they re-focused on devices that simply worked and /seemed/ simple. Candy-colored iMacs weren't what Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak imagi ...
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Via: UserVoice
Head of Community @UserVoice in San Francisco, singer in the |
The occasional batshit insane customer email, which, if you care about your business, can be terribly upsetting, because you can't help but think What did I do wrong?? and your natural instinct is to engage and try to fix it. This is often a mistake. For starters, you often can't fix it, because the customer has a serious problem... and it's not your product. ...
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Via: UnicornFree
I put the Amy in anomaly. Bootstrapper, product crusader, Ru |
It is an unfortunate fact that many startups talk to people like me (or their investors or their advisors or "industry experts") instead of talking to their users. ...
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Via: Users Know
Principal at Users Know. Director of Product & UX at One J |
Ever so often, I get asked a question like "Should I be worried about telling people my idea?" The question almost always comes from first-time entrepreneurs. It's a commonly blogged about topic among entrepreneurs and VC's, but I'd like to add in my two cents. ...
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Via: Nat Turner
Co-founder of Flatiron Health. Previously Co-Founder/CEO of |
In January 2010, I remember shakingFounder Collective's Eric Paley's hand after pitching Yipit to him for an hour and struggling to smile as we left his office. The meeting had been a complete disaster. Founder Collective wasn't going to be investing. Maybe nobody would. I remember thinking I had been so foolish for having been excited just a few hours before. ...
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Via: Bostinnovation
Co-Founder and CEO of @Yipit. Sharing lessons learned as a f |
Putting work in front of people for criticism is pretty hard. After all, who wants to expose something they've poured their blood, sweet and tears to criticism? Who likes hearing where they've gone wrong? But we need constructive feedback to improve our designs, our products. We need good feedback or we risk failure. ...
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Via: ZURB Blog
Editor @ZURB, Writer, Educator, and occasional Starship Com |
For most new high-tech products, the first customers are always "early adopters." The conventional wisdom is that early adopters are the ideal target for new products, to get business rolling. I see two pitfalls with any concerted focus on early adopters; first, the size of this group may not be as large as you think, [...] ...
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Via: Hot Sauce!
Veteran startup mentor, executive, blogger, author, tech pro |
Let's face it; it's no fun when someone complains. Some people, the saying goes, just like to complain. Best to give them what they want and send them away, right? Not really. Complaints can provide such valuable market feedback that you'll want to include strategies in your business plan for dealing with them. .. ...
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Via: Business Planning
All things social enterprise/social ventures, author Venture |
The greatest gift you can give an entrepreneur is creative criticism. The greatest skill an entrepreneur can have is critical listening. I was going to write a long post (and now that I have started writing, I will probably end up being long-winded) about how, as an entrepreneur, you have to cut through the positive ...
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Via: Learn to Duck
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An optimal price is one that is accepted but not without some initial resistance. It is your job to both set that price and convince the customer... Pricing is considered more art than science but in the next series of posts I'd like to explore tactics for demystifying how to set and test pricing. ...
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Via: Swombat on Startups
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Yes, you "know" that your power users are different (more vocal, more active, more tech-savvy, more exploratory) than your mainstream users. But do you know HOW MUCH different they are? Chances are, they're not 10% more active. They're not 20% more expert. It's probably more like 100%. 200%. 500%. ...
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Via: Cindy Alvarez
Making people more awesome through building better software. |
I had a big realization yesterday: I don't know anything. I'm talking about Airtime for Email. I know that people are interested in it. We've had almost 100 businesses sign up since launch. I know it's a validated idea - we have paying customers. Knowing that kind of thing just tells me that I should keep working on Airtime. But the problem is that I have no idea WHAT I should be doing. ...
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Via: Dan Shipper
UPenn junior. Co-Founder at @UseFirefly. Jets fan. |
How do you measure how much your users like your product? This is one of the essential question that every founder needs to answer to make the right decisions - to move the product ahead. In some lean startup related discussion I stumbled accross the idea of asking your users if they were sad if the used product would vanish. As the lean startup is all about validating assumptions based on data ...
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Via: connex.io Blog
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Negative feedback hurts. It’s easy to take personally and get offended. It’s easy to dismiss too. But negative feedback is a lot better than no feedback at all. The worst thing for a startup -at any stage- is crickets. ...
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Via: Instigator Blog
VP Product @GoInstant. Partner @YearOneLabs. Ex-CEO/Founder |
One of the things that many businesses fear about being online is that they will open the door to people publicly criticizing them, their products, or their services. But it doesn’t matter whether your business is online or not – if your customers are online, then people will still be talking about you! I have [...] ...
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I am a freelance writer, blogger, and social media enthusias |
For a long time, there were niche communities of “lo-fi” camera enthusiasts: people who enjoyed photos taken on old cameras that had interesting ways of filtering shots. The iPhone app Hipstamatic popularized lo-fi filters, selling over 1M copies. Because Hipstamatic lacked sharing features, many users took pictures with Hipstamatic and then shared those pictures using othe ...
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Via: chris dixon's blog
Founder & investor |
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