Sending Customer Development Surveys

There are some good suggestions in the post and in the comments, especially by David Barrett of Expensify and Lance Walley. Two suggestions I would add:

   o probe for how satisfied customers would encourage others to try your product.

   o listen to "drop-outs" to understand what is dissatisfying

Here are two blog posts that contain more suggestions for direct conversation to understand customer perspective from the stories they tell you as much as the multiple choice questions they answer.

The Best Feedback From Your Early Customers Is a Story http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2007/11/29/the-best-feedback-fr...

The Best Way To Get Feedback From Early Customers Is a Conversation http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2007/11/28/the-best-way-to-get-...

EDIT: It's also good to bear in mind http://xkcd.com/523/ for the limits of numbers for understanding relationships, Lord Kelvin's injunction to "measure everything" doesn't always lead to greater understanding.

Here's a short list of advice for how to send customer development surveys. The CEOs of Recurly and Expensify both left great comments arguing for and against using surveys vs. direct customer development.

[Disclaimer, I wrote this post, but I don't submit everything I write -- the comments really push this post into being useful].