Research is organized chaos with purpose

Here’s a quick overview of our plunge into the fascinating world of small businesses!

Our target: American small businesses

Recall from our last post that we chose small businesses, which are really the backbone of the overall US economy. There are 28 million small businesses in the country, representing 99.7% of all employers and employing 56 million workers (~50% of the overall workforce). The goal of our research is to deeply understand the problems small businesses face in order to inform the designing of solutions that address real, underlying issues.

What is our overall research approach?

We want to combine broad SECONDARY and deep PRIMARY research to produce cross-cutting insights that can be translated to venture concepts that solve real underlying issues. Deeply understanding and empathizing with our target users is a critical part of the venture design process, and so we devote 5 weeks in total to iterative research and synthesis.

Secondary research

To prepare SECONDARY research, we collected and summarized important takeaways from articles and journals (really everything we found interesting from valid sources online and in books). We compiled a list of what secondary research notes which outlined personal problems for small business owners, story’s from failed or successful businesses and channels for capital, cash flow and marketing for small businesses - to name a few. Through this data we began to draw a stakeholder map (aka people we want to interview) within the population of small businesses that included an array of people between owners, hourly-paid workers, and partners/collaborators. Then we collected statistics to further segment small businesses by what defined them (i.e., staff size, annual revenue, industry, stage of operation, product/service etc.).

Primary research

Now, to prepare PRIMARY research (the bulk of our information) we conducted a crash course in ethnographic research. The key thing to keep in mind is empathy. It is not that hard to find interview guides online (and you can totally ask us too) but the real goal is to empathize with your user. Everything you say can and will be used against you (haha). When speaking to a user, you cannot be judging or a cynic or a scared voice. You must set a comfortable and open space for your user to give you the gold of insights.

We prepared a one page-pitch and began to reach out to everyone we could connect to in our personal and professional networks (we even did a few walk-ins). The pitch introduced our team and research incentives along with the above blurb on small businesses. For a couple weeks we did not have much luck with unanswered emails and rejected visits at retail shops. Yet we persevered some people started noticing us and were responding positively. We captured all conversations word verbatim as best we could on electrically shared documents. We conducted weekly updates on our user research and pivoted our pitch and interview questions as we unveiled unanswered questions. This sharing of insights and reiterating on interview process was facilitated by none other than Mr. Powerpoint, Mr. Whiteboard and Mr. Post-it.

SPECIAL CAUTION: While this may seem like a flexible investigative journey into the unknown with only a crayon to mark your chartered path, we highly advise you to assume a detailed time schedule and goal for the research questions you would like to answer. It is also imperative that you establish communication channels and behaviors. Though they may all change with time (and as the team becomes more friendly) it is imperative there is a starting strategy to work from and an awesome timekeeper that promotes a safe and healthy rhythm to the process. And voila! We are on board the bff-ls train with some pretty wild insights and synthesis.

Last words

Finally, our insights grow by the day as we diligently explore the web’s abyss, the libraries’ archives and people’s/strangers’ brains for anything that feeds our BSS soul (of course it doesn’t make sense to you, that’s why you should get in touch and ask. We don’t bite unless you’re a sandwich).

It is very important to be patient during this process of organized chaos! Do not, however, ‘take a back seat’ - rather, hash out your disagreements and ideas openly. But also don’t let your bias and prior working habits limit your exposure or your creativity, cause that shit creeps up on you like a feather stuck on the bottom of your pants that infects you with bird flu. And above all — have fun! Goshdarnit you can’t help anyone if you’re unhappy or unsatisfied.

Stay tuned for our next post where we will share our research experience in more detail!