Ask HN: Best ways to learn what users want? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best ways to learn what users want?

3 pointsyayitswei7 comments

I think understand "build" part of "build something people want" relatively well, but I don't have the second part figured out. In my particular case, my friend and I launched an online deal aggregator/notifier on the Android market a couple days ago. We built it to scratch our own itch but also as an exercise in creating a desirable product. We have 100-500 downloads, but no one has commented or rated the app in the market, or contacted us through our support blog.

I've tried surveys and direct emails in past projects and found that people often gave conflicting feature requests and the responses were difficult to make sense of. I've also found Steve Blank's customer development helpful as a framework, but what's the best way to apply that to non-enterprise projects?

Thanks!

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John Mullins describes a lightweight technique called the "long interview" in The New Business Road Test. I've only used this seriously once. The results of my trial provided good insights but were not as definite as I'd hoped.

Another method I heard from a startup marketing guru is that if you have a large number of users running a free or pre-release version, you should ask them, "how disappointed would you be if this product were discontinued?" You have product-market fit when a significant portion answer that they would be "very disappointed."

I've also had the impression that feature requests are not a particularly useful metric by themselves. The fact that you have conflicting feature requests probably indicates that your market is highly subsegmented. It might be useful to try to map these subsegments demographically and need-wise.

Thanks for your insights. I like the "how disappointed would you be" approach since it's a question users can easily answer that conveys actionable information.

Incidentally, I just ordered the "Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development" that I found through HN, and quite a few people on here endorsed. If anyone's interested, I'll share the results of reading/applying that book.

This is the site: http://dealdealdeal.net/

And this is the HN submission for feedback: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1713519

How are you monetizing the app? Do you have a way of seeing how much people are actually using it after downloading?

We have Google analytics for the web app, as well as the unread count for each user, so we can see if they are looking at the deals or not.

As far as monetization, we were thinking of either affiliate revenue or selling the app if people were willing to pay for it, but the main goal was to see if we could make something people liked.

So, are they looking at the deals? That's important feedback.

About a tenth of our registered users look at the deals.

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