Got a new idea for your business? A product or app idea that people will love? A startup idea that’s going to change the world? Congratulations! You have taken the first step on a wild ride.
Coming up with an idea that you know will do well is one of the best feelings in the world.
Enjoy it.
Now on to step two. How do you really know your idea will do well once it’s out in the big wide world. You need to validate your idea somehow — ask your friends (not good), visit the local psychic (really not good) or, maybe, conduct some sort of survey or questionnaire.
Surveys are a great way to get structured feedback on an idea. Yet most do a very poor job of telling you if your idea will do well in market — for several reasons.
People don’t do what they say they will do
Surveys often include questions along the lines of “How likely are you to buy this product in the next 6 months?” The people filling out the survey will then be asked to select a box, “Very likely,” “Likely” and so on. People select one of the boxes depending on how they’re feeling at the time. This, though, has no bearing on whether they will buy the product when it’s launched.
I don’t even know what I’m going to have for breakfast tomorrow. How does a survey expect me to know if I will buy something 6 months down the road?
If people don’t know, they’ll make it up
Imagine this nice person walks up to you and asks, “What is your favorite color?” What do you reply? “Red,” “Green,” “Pink,” “Purple” — who knows? Unless you’re a seven year old — and if you are, why are you reading this blog post? — you probably don’t really have strong feelings about color. The answer of “Red” or “Green” has no bearing on how you behave. You answered with a color because that’s what the question demanded.
This happens in surveys all the time.
Surveys about new ideas are constantly asking people questions they don’t have an answer to, so people make one up. For example, a survey asks, “Is this idea unique and different, or is it similar to what is already on the market?” Unless people answering the survey are really into the idea they’ve just been presented with and they take a break to compare it to everything else they can find on Google, they’re going to have no idea.
They will, however, provide you with an answer by ticking one of the boxes, “Extremely different,” “Not at all unique” … Great, right? Wrong. This hard-earned feedback tells you nothing useful about your idea.
The psychology is all wrong
Unless you have access to a large list of existing contacts, you’ll probably need to get a service like Survey Monkey to send people to your survey. You pay these services to pay people to complete your survey, which is a problem when it comes to trying to predict if your idea will work in market.
People completing the surveys are paid to give feedback, they are not giving answers because they’re interested in your idea. In market, you need people to pay you for your idea, not the other way round.
Surveys are a great tool to gather feedback on an idea when they’re done well — but they’re very hard to do well. While surveys can tell you lots of useful things, they aren’t a great way to validate whether your idea will work in market. The only way to understand that is to measure real behavior from real customers when they come in contact with your idea.
Seedling is a tool that helps you test ideas with real customers before investing time and money.
Originally published at seedling.io.
