Consumer research before market testing

How to smartly do some research to refine the level of validation you need to do with your MVP

I feel like a lot of folks in the start-up world look down on consumer research—surveys, interviews, focus groups. The rationale is that:

• Consumers don’t know what they really want—a lot of consumers might have thrown up over the first iPod
• There’s a huge gap between what consumers say and do—a greater % of people say they’ll pay more for a “greener” product than actually do
• Traditional consumer research has many biases—the researcher can bias the question, or consumers can have their own internal motivation (e.g., they want to seem more eco-conscious than they are)

As a result, the best strategy that these folks would espouse is to build something quick-and-dirty and ship it out to test immediately. If I were a super-developer, I could afford to conduct all my tests on the basis of live prototypes; but I’m not. Therefore, for me, it makes sense to filter down the world of what I need to test by first validating some hypotheses via research.

For me, this meant one month of dedicated research. I talked to ~40 consumers, and corroborated what they said against competitive strategies and general consumer studies. In doing so, I was able to prove/dis-prove some high level assumptions, and get a better sense of the prototype I needed to build.

If the research-first approach might work for you, I have some suggestions:

Manage the hypothetical

• Asking consumers about a hypothetical product or service that doesn’t exist causes responses to skew more toward either “yes” or “no”
• To manage this, try a focus group that emulates the environment with real names, and props (and you being there to read body language/ clear up confusion)

Time-box yourself

• I gave myself one-month to do as many interviews as possible
• This incentivized me to be really efficient (e.g., targeted individuals in hypothesized target audience who were most likely to be free)
• And also prevented me from trying to follow every tangential thought

Don’t stress out about randomization

• At the earliest stages, I just want to know that I’m solving one group of user’s problems really well. Once it scales, then I can think about how big this user is and how to broaden the market
• Not to mention it’s hard to randomize when you have limited time
• Therefore, I focused quite heavily on interviewing one target audience, with some minor variations (e.g., not all from the same company, not the same age, etc.)

Don’t discount interviews with non-users

• Though I did try to filter out people who I thought would never use my product, I did get some of them
• Instead of ending the interview, I dedicating these discussions to letting the consumer just vent about the overall process of “getting stuff”
• I find this is a great way to pick up great ideas for pivots or tangential features (and admittedly, nourish the part of me that wants to follow tangent thoughts!)

This blarticle was written in the context of building a product that helps people borrow occasional-use items (e.g., camping tents, electric drills) from their friends & neighbors. Check out the prototype here.