Survey!
As a product creator and engineer, I like to build things that I love. And, I think it is one of the most important traits a successful creator/innovator needs to have. But when you are fairly new to building a commercial product, you need to understand that not everyone out there shares the same emotions about the product as you do. And what is the best way to find out if you are in the right direction and if people are going to resonate with your idea of the best product ever? Ask them.
To be honest, I have always known about this but have been ignorant enough to not execute this simple but extremely effective task. I finally convinced myself to do it & trust me you need to do it too.
You don’t have to have years of experience in an industry to build something people will love, you have to just ask them!
The Beginnings
Calamus’ beginnings come from Formula SAE where we hand built one-off formula prototype cars. So, building custom parts and vehicles in our very genes. While building a bike that was extremely cost-effective for the Indian market, we realized the bike lost the aspirational value which we hold very dear to us. When you are trying to build a low-cost product at cut throat operating expenses, it is going to have a lot of standard parts. This is not what we wanted to do. We wanted to create a beautifully crafted and modern vehicle that people would aspire to have. Build something that people would want to paste a poster of on their walls.
We created some sketches and some beautiful illustrations. And we started listing the best e-bikes around the world — Vanmoof, Stromer, Schindelhauer, Riese& Muller, Haibike, Canyon to name a few and analyzed why they are liked so much. And, what is it that they are missing out on.
We started interacting with people on different social media platforms like Reddit, Facebook groups, forums, blogs, etc. We wanted to find out all the problems with current e-bikes in the market and understand what people expect from an ideal e-bike.
“People’s E-bike” that’s what we wanted to make!
This research helped us gauge what needed to be done to make an ideal e-bike people would absolutely love to have. But this wasn’t going to be enough.
Which led us to our next step — Survey.
We needed to validate what we were trying to create and that’s where the idea of the survey came in.
The Questions asked.
We started to list down all types of questions we need to ask in order to understand the background of our potential customers.
- Firstly it was important for us to know if the individual owns an e-bike or any premium cycle and if they do which one do they own. This would help us understand what kind of products interests him/her.
- We also had a question asking about what additional accessories/features are they interested in and if there was any additional feature that they would want us to offer.
- Asking if they would be willing to pay a 49$ advance booking amount for this product idea was the most crucial question for us as this would give us a more accurate idea about if this project is exciting enough for them to back.
- We ended our survey with a series of optional personal questions like asking their name, age, location, occupation and email id.
This is our survey — Calamus Survey
The tools of our choice.
We created our survey on Survey Monkey and circulated it in Facebook groups, WhatsApp groups, Reddit, Bicycle forums, and with friends & family. According to us, Survey Monkey is very convenient and has minimal fees (i.e 13$ per month), the user interface is very simple and has quality survey templates. There are some other survey tools out there like Google forms, Typeform, Zoho survey that you should consider too.
Results
Out of well over 500 responses we received, 67 were willing to pay the 49$ advance amount. Also, 82 people were interested in the project and gave their e-mail addresses. At the end of the survey, we knew the demographics of our potential customer and could plan our marketing strategy accordingly. We also had data for most preferred features and could now finalize the feature list of our bike based on these responses.
These numbers were extremely encouraging for us and at the same time helped us focus our efforts in the right direction.
Survey Tips & Tricks.
Based on our knowledge and experience these are the few things you should keep in mind while conducting a survey:
1. Keep it short- Your survey should not take more than 1–2 mins to complete. (Depending on the simplicity, can even go down to 20–30s)
2. Don’t start with personal questions- Do not, I repeat, DO NOT start your survey with personal questions! Surveys asking too much personal information at the start have a very low completion rate.
3. Compulsory questions- The most important questions should be made compulsory, the user should not be allowed to proceed with the survey without answering these(Personal questions should not be compulsory).
4. Don’t give too many options- Your questions should not have too many options, too many options irritate people making it confusing and also increases the time required to complete the survey.
5. It should be full proof- The survey should be well thought and tested, formatting errors should be avoided. The language used should be very simple and easy to understand.
