I've been thinking about this a lot lately.
If you are a solo founder/ bootstrapper, what do you do get honest feedback on your products/ideas?
Especially when you're just starting out, and have no users yet.
Who do you ask?
- Friends and family - Other founders in communities - Twitter
Anyone else?
Would love to know your approach or if something that worked for you.
Thanks
Me: “The lights are too bright, right?” (Hardware product)
User: “No they are fine but I wish the display was larger.”
I think questioning like this makes user comfortable criticising you.
The next step is to just differentiate between actual feedback and opinions that are intertwined in so much of the information the user could pass to you haha.
I've found by starting with my own insult/complaint, people feel more comfortable to open up a bit.
Not just specific to products, btw, but anything you want an honest opinion on.
Unfortunately it also means I can seldom enjoy anything and other people find me annoying. :/
So basically, have a similar approach to a physical business even for a software business.
Thanks for sharing.
Here's a summary: https://www.slideshare.net/xamde/summary-of-the-mom-test
The closer you are to the target user and target buyer (not necessarily the same person), the better. You can learn a lot from anyone, but it might be at a pretty abstract level and less useful.
Focus as much as you can on users and buyers. Speak with them often, observe what they do often, wherever they are - conversations with you, chatting with each other online, complaining about current pain points with existing solutions, including in reviews for products that solve similar problems.
Good luck!
I'm a big fan of The Mom Test. Fantastic book.
But I was more curious about how are people actually applying it's lessons in their actual business.
Something I did which was highly effective was set up a Discord server to watch users talk about my product with each other. Doesn’t have to be Discord. Can be a Facebook group, sub-Reddit, etc
One thing that people complained about was price, so I decided to ask people what price they thought was fair, from a list of three options (50% off, 75% off, and 99¢/yr). I then offered them a coupon code at whatever price they indicated was fair.
After offering this for years, and with over a thousand people going through this branch of the survey (which required saying that cost was the primary reason for uninstall), only a handful took me up on the discount. My takeaway from this is that lots of people will say that something should be X% cheaper, but nearly all of those people would not buy it even if it were that price.
Having learned this lesson, I no longer offer the uninstall discount, or many discounts at all.
When we started out with Quepid, we found a small handful of champions that loved the idea and advocated heavily for adopting the tool in their orgs. They became an extension of the team. We engaged with them all the time. We did everything we could to take their feedback seriously. Even if they never even converted their orgs to heavy users, their feedback was worth the high level of investment.
We also offered consulting services and would use the tool on our own projects. Here we were the customer to ourselves, and had to ensure the product was stable during engagements.
During consulting, we would train up teams on the tool. We could see where they fell in love with it and where it wasn’t a good fit.
As a SaaS product, we weren’t successful. We decided to focus on just the consulting business model. In the end Quepid became open source, and the community built around it seeded the open source community.
Perhaps more useful answer is to be part of a practitioner community, as you noted.
2) have them use / experience the product and watch them
3) have them think out loud while their doing that and keenly observe how they use experience the product
4) the observations should point to low hanging fruit for improvement
5) ask open ended unbiased questions about the experience and listen to them talk about it. Example: what did you think?
6) you don’t necessarily need to use a big sample size to get good feedback. Getting feedback from 10 people, you will see six that show the same pattern and you will then know to focus on that
7) hypothesize on improvements from what you learn, build, release again a and repeat feedback with real users
8) you will know you have something great when people show they are impressed. Be careful if people just saying it’s great as everyone will do this, so you will only really know if it’s great through observing.
9) if you can’t do this and are a solo founder, you probably will have a very difficult time with sales once you find product market fit since you always have to be in front of people and pitching
Add analytics, even rudimentary. Something like PostHog is good.
Add monitoring (Sentry) so you catch exceptions in your code when soon to be people and systems use your product without them having to report them. You'll fix problems faster and prioritize (most frequent, most impactful, etc).
Create a Slack workspace where your users could ask questions.
Get users.
Observe behavior and usage. Keep an eye on non-consumption. Schedule calls with them and ask about what they're trying to accomplish with your product.
If they're not using a feature you know they need or have stopped using it (from analytics), ask why they're not using it or not using it anymore (the load time is just too long, it's buggy, it doesn't support their use case, they moved on to something else or to another role).
Look at where people are coming from (referrers in analytics) but also ask them where they're coming from (community? subreddit? HN? Word of mouth? Someone mentioned it? Who? Ask them. Rinse and repeat. Investigate everything.)
Look at email addresses and their domains. Are they university accounts? Are there many from the same organization? Investigate. Ask questions on how they signed up and what they're trying to do.
You want to get users. You'll get all the feedback you need, either active or passive (them not using something, not doing something, dropping something mid-action).
Ask questions. Don't really ask for "feedback" because you're putting them on the spot. Ask "Have you tried x?". If you're aware of an issue in something, let it out, they may laugh and be relieved because they didn't want to break it to you, but you did and now they can go on about why something sucks for them because they now know you won't be butthurt if they say something.
Ask questions to know the problem they are trying to solve and you'll get reasons or usage or non-usage (work in a very sensitive organization and they can't, regulations, formats, etc).
Asking for "feedback" in the form it is most known is like asking someone what they think of you. Mostly useless and uncomfortable. You want people to be comfortable sharing with you, and they're most comfortable talking about the problems they're having.
Multiple ways to do this.
Th easiest, imo, is to set up a simple landing page for your idea. Know before-hand who might be interested in your product, if it's just a handful of people, that works too. Just prepare for a lot of manual work (getting in touch with people and conversing about your product in different ways without making it seem like some sort of an ad), at least until your first 1000 users, more so for the first 500 (assuming your end-users are individuals and not businesses).
1. You talk with real people, it's way more complex than doing a survey, but you'll get better data. 2. Talk to your customers or ask your potential customers if you don't have them.
3. Don't ask your friends, especially your mum - she'll tell you've got a great product because she loves you.
4. Important thing is to ask open-ended questions that don't suggest the answers. 5. You should see patterns after interviewing about 5-20 people. 6. Then, you use the answers and create a survey that will be statistically significant (about 384 respondents) - there're paid services that let you do that.
That's it.
Most people should avoid friends and family. Or rather "normies" who aren't your target market. You'll get dishonest replies by people who want to support you, people who are blindly envious, people who want to sound clever or helpful. You'll often get feedback like "this costs too much" or "this is too ugly", when your actual target market is happy for it.
Sometimes you can get small grants to cover professional advice, which can include feedback, or sometimes there will be events where you can get such advice from experts for free.
I also help run an invetors' club, and that is another good venue for advice.
The other thing that I find works really well is "what is your least favorite thing about this tool?"
When we started in 2017, the pattern was similar but just more 1x1 basis and more frequent(catch up each week)
Not sure best practices for B2C
Finding users is a the priority.
It is hard painful work.
Good luck.
Any culture where people tend to be direct will do.
Source : I am a UX Researcher :)
Never get defensive.