The Accidental Entrepreneurs
Ep 24: How did you get feedback from your customers?
Ever wondered how to what the best way is to get feedback from your customers? Gathering useful user feedback for products in development is a critical step to building the right stuff. In this episode, we share creative strategies, such as involving children and parents for initial testing and how to set up an active engaged user group on social media. At the end of the day, the trick is to create a safe environment that triggers real, honest feedback from your audience.
Special mentions:
Dr. Ellen Langer, Harvard’s renowned ‘Mother of Mindfulness
Mauricio Dujowich
Tip of the week:
Ira: Advice from Mauricio
Stacee: Advice on making decisions
Ever wondered how to what the best way is to get feedback from your customers? Gathering useful user feedback for products in development is a critical step to building the right stuff. In this episode, we share creative strategies, such as involving children and parents for initial testing and how to set up an active engaged user group on social media. At the end of the day, the trick is to create a safe environment that triggers real, honest feedback from your audience.
Special mentions:
Dr. Ellen Langer, Harvard’s renowned ‘Mother of Mindfulness
Mauricio Dujowich
Tip of the week:
Ira: Advice from Mauricio
Stacee: Advice on making decisions
Hello and welcome. I am Ira Gordon and, along with Stacee Santi, the host of the Accidental Entrepreneurs Podcast. We each previously founded successful companies Along the way. We became business owners and eventually sold those businesses despite us having no real background in business or ever even planning to become entrepreneurs. In other words, we did this all despite originally having no idea what we were doing or getting ourselves into. In each episode of this podcast, we will share stories and tips from our journey and we'll answer a randomly chosen question about our experience. Let's jump right into the show. Good day, S tacee. How have you been?
Stacee:Good, how are you, I ira? Nice to see you.
Ira:I am doing well. It's wonderful to see you too. What is new on the side of the world?
Stacee:Well, we're getting ready to make the trek back to Colorado with the six horses, four chickens, two dogs and one cat. So that's top of mind for us at the moment.
Ira:Wow, is this like rustling everybody up and riding across Great Plains, or is this loading up some gigantic set of vehicles?
Stacee:Yeah, we have to take two trucks and trailers to get everyone from Arizona over to Colorado. So my husband asked me to drive a truck and trailer and I was like I don't think that's a good idea. I don't feel good about that. He's like how hard is it? I'm like I would only be able to go in a straight line. I'll tell you, I'm sure I can figure it out, but our kiddo came to town to help us do that. So I've been waiting to talk to you because I wanted to tell you about this study I just came across. It's about okay. So they took these students at the university and they had them write some opinion about something it could be anything and then they told him their opinion was going to be reviewed by the professor. So the professor, regardless of what anybody wrote, the comment was something like this is terrible idea. I can't believe we even have students at this college that think this way.
Ira:You see professors like that.
Stacee:And then the students.
Ira:Maybe I was just a subject of an experiment and nobody told me.
Stacee:Yeah, you didn't even know. And then the students were given two options. One is they could crumple it up and throw it away. The other is put it in a drawer. And then they did a post review of their emotional state I can't remember how long later and what they discovered is the people that drew it away had pretty much forgot about it or, like had such almost a complete resolution of their anger, and the people that put it in the drawer were still angry about it. And I keep thinking about that and how you know for sure, being a veterinarian but also being an entrepreneur, how you get people tell you negative things that I mean I know. One time at my first trade show, this guy walked up and he goes this is the dumbest idea I've ever heard and like holding on to that is so toxic. And so they just said that you should. The recommendation is, if you get negative interaction with someone, you should actually write it down and then crumple it up and chuck it.
Ira:Interesting. So I'm thinking about my experiences driving and being treated less than kindly by some of my fellow drivers from time to time. And, as you probably know, I'm a pretty zen, even keeled, kind of guy most of the time, but sometimes things just really drive you nuts because they're dangerous or rude or all of the above. And most of the time, you know, I hold it in, especially now that I'm often driving with kids.
Ira:But a few times in my life I'm going to admit that I have said and gestured aggressively after these things have happened and I'm not necessarily proud of it. But I would say, man, it feels pretty good, you know, like you get it all out, you get it over with, and as long as nothing bad comes of it, it does kind of make you feel better, I gotta say.
Stacee:Yeah, that's probably a good way to use it.
Ira:What do you do in the heat of the moment, when you're really upset about something?
Stacee:Oh, I'm Italian, so it's not good I've had to train myself.
Stacee:I usually go like some people think and are nervous to confront people. I've always been the opposite. I will jump the gun and get in there and be like what the heck? And just blah, blah, blah and then think about it later. My, my key employee, karen, and longtime friend. She always used to tell me we, we need less aim. Point out of you. That's usually what I do. I try to think about things longer now, like give it 24 hours. If you're still mad, then go for it.
Ira:So people tell me that it's the opposite, that they can tell I'm really mad when I get really quiet. Oh, yeah, yeah, I'm really mad when I get really quiet. Um, yeah, but uh, but the truth is nobody really knows this, but I'm a thrower. Um, I just never throw things at people or when people can see me, usually, um, and so I'm really mad. Like, you know, there was a mistake in the clinic. I just can't believe we screwed something up, or uh, you know, or something like that. This just got me really upset. Like I will go somewhere and find something and throw it really hard at something. I'm pretty good about not breaking anything, or at least breaking anything other than the very cheap thing I'm throwing, but that is how I tend to deal with things when I'm extraordinarily upset.
Stacee:I can't even see you being mad, you're so nice.
Ira:Yeah, no, that's what most people would say. I can just tell when you're really quiet that you're really upset about something. But sometimes I get really quiet, I find someplace else quiet and I throw something. It's my little secret. Be aware, if Ira gets quiet and leaves the room, something's going to happen If you see Ira like quiet in a hallway or something like don't look in the hallway, you might be about to throw something.
Stacee:Well, let's jump into today's topic. The question of the week is how did you get feedback on your product in Iterate?
Ira:What a great question and I think it can vary. In my experience varied a lot based on sort of the stage of the product. I think in the very earliest of stages what we tend to do is just give it to friends to use and ask what they thought, ask what they thought could be better, ask what they didn't like and try to use that to improve. The team we had everybody use the product as much as we could and try to break things. That's always been something I've loved doing since I was a little kid is like trying to figure out the glitches and video games and that kind of thing, and so that suits me well. And you know, a little bit later on I think we of course would always listen to users. Once you have users it gets to be a little bit easier and ultimately we sort of formalized that process and brought on a head of sort of user experience that was tasked with talking to our users, talking to prospective users and giving them the product to use and asking for feedback or asking about ideas, all those sorts of things for feedback or asking about ideas, all those sorts of things.
Ira:But it can be pretty tricky, especially if you have a product that's not really that usable yet or that you're embarrassed to show to people because it's not quite there yet. Finding people that you trust that are still relevant to the product. Your friends might not be users. My wife is not a veterinarian. I can't ask her to use a test prep tool for veterinary students. She just has no domain knowledge to give relevant feedback, so that can be a little tricky. How about you?
Stacee:Yeah, similar. Some of my first early, early users were actually my kids and their friends. They were like about 10 years old and I'd always seem to have this group of boys at my house, you know, playing in the summer and hanging out. And I'm working on the product early on, and one like I'll never forget. One of the features we had was where a client could share a picture of their pet into the app, and I was trying to come up with a name, and so I'd bake cookies for the boys and I bring them in and I'd say, all right, what's a good name for this? And we all came up with a. Well, they came up with selfie shots. I'm like, okay, that's a good name, and then I'd start testing things on them because they're so good with technology. They knew all the latest and what's not cool and what is cool. So I was always floating ideas. So they were probably my first user group. Isn't that so funny A bunch of little kids.
Stacee:It advanced, though, of course, as we grew the company and started going. The first level of users for us testers was always my team and my parents. I find that sometimes it's about the content and what you're trying to do, but a lot of times it's about the user experience and if you can figure it out without having to read an instruction booklet. Like were you shocked when you get your iPhone and there is no instruction booklet?
Ira:Thought about it. I know I wouldn't read it if it was there.
Stacee:I mean, I used to look for it because I wanted to know how to do something, and then I realized, okay, this has to be so simple that you wouldn't read the booklet, even if you had it. As the company got bigger and the product got bigger, one of the things we knew we had to be good at was being connected to our top users and be able to get feedback. So we played around with a couple of different ways to do this, but we ultimately found the biggest success in a private Facebook group. We set this up and when you signed up for our platform, anybody that was using the platform could be in the user group.
Stacee:And we try to do fun things in the user group. It can't just be all you know, taking information from your customers. So we would give random prizes out, we would have videos, you know, like fun stuff. We'd even had a mascot, mr Meowgi, and he would dance to songs like Hammer Time, and so we tried to make it a balance of fun and positivity, so then we could get a big following in there. And then when we needed user feedback, we could drop features there. So we'd usually drop features early in that group and kind of give them early access, which they found cool because they're in the VIP club, but what we were really after was their feedback so they could test it first. So you're just kind of just targeting your early adopters and telling them we really need your feedback on this.
Ira:Love that approach and you followed one of my, I think, secret rules of product development. I want to take credit for this, but I probably shouldn't. But I have this rule that you oftentimes are faced with a choice when building a product between making something more fun versus making it more useful, and my rule is always choose more fun. Yeah, and my role is always choose more fun. Yeah, because fun is what actually drives people to use the product. And, as useful as something is, if it's not fun to use, nobody's going to use it and nobody's going to get the usefulness of it. And probably in part because my bias is towards trying to make things logical and useful, I say, whenever you are thinking about that choice, always make it more fun, I say whenever you are thinking about that choice, always make it more fun.
Stacee:Well, you know it's so funny you say that is. We spent an insane amount of time listening to cat meows and dog barks because I wanted the notification tone to be or we have to hear it over and over and over again.
Stacee:Right, that's a big deal it over and, over and over again, right, so it's a big deal. Well, then it came. Then this debate came up about. All right, let's say you have a household with dogs and cats. What if the notification was a dog sound, but it might scare the cat? Or should it the default be the cat meow, which we all suppose the dog would enjoy? Uh, so we ended up. The default was the cat meow for a multi-species home.
Ira:Very, very good design thinking there, Stacee.
Stacee:Isn't that clever? I also want to say a word or two about how you approach your client for getting feedback, or your customer, because one thing I think happens that you need to be aware of is people are generally nice, especially if they see how much you care about something. They may not feel inclined to tell you the truth if it sucks, and so you really have to create a safe environment for them to give you feedback so they don't worry about hurting your feelings. So a lot of times that means the founder can't do this because they really don't want to hurt your feelings and make you sad, especially if you've been working a long time on something. So any tips for that, I ira?
Ira:Well, I have a few thoughts. I would say one thing that lots of people try to do that I think works really poorly most of the time is surveys. I think that you get a very skewed population of people that even respond to surveys, that they're asked specific questions, and you just oftentimes get misleading and or not very actionable information.
Stacee:I think doing the same survey you know on a cadence over and over again to try to identify, you know, trends within that sort of same experience, if you will, is a good thing to do, but if you're actually looking for useful feedback, I think that's a waste of time Most of the time, especially if you pay the end user for a survey or or put them in a drawing for something because think about it their goal is, prop like it could be to really help you, but it could just be to get the free thing, and so they're going to go through the survey as quickly as possible just to complete it, and then you might be making critical decisions based on that person that wasn't even really that interested in doing the survey for helping you.
Ira:I think there is a lot of validity in what you shared regarding having maybe a more detached person seek some of that feedback instead of the founder.
Ira:But I'm going to disagree a little bit and say that outsourcing that when it's really important can lead to a lot of things maybe getting missed or lost in translation as well, and I think when you're looking for maybe more specific feedback, that might be great, but when you need, you know, really insightful commentary, I think it's something that you really can't outsource to a, you know, upper manager or lower level person.
Ira:I think it has to be a founder or leader doing it. Founder or leader doing it, and you really need to go into those conversations, even though you think there's something specific that you want to know. That's not what you should be asking about, right, you need to just kind of figure out, like you know what was, you know what are their problems and is your product actually meaningfully solving that problem? When you ask specific questions about like well, what was this like and what was this like, you may be spending a lot of time fixing things that are not actually important things, right, and so, depending on kind of the stage of your company and the type of feedback that you need. I think that can really mean different things for who should be sort of gutting those interviews and I say interviews and not surveys specifically, and what types of questions you should be asking, and the more open-ended the better.
Stacee:Totally. That's why I love that. Don't lead the witness.
Ira:If you lead the witness, they'll tell you what you want to hear.
Stacee:Yeah, don't lead the witness. I really loved that Facebook group because what ended up happening is you put it out there and say you have first access. We really want to hear your thoughts, share them in the comments, and we'd have a few things happen. You know, some people would be like I love this so much. Other people would say, well, what about this? And if one person said it, other people felt more comfortable to chime in on it and we could see a trend. And then some people would say, well, this is a great, but why aren't you working on this for us? And then we're like, okay, and then we would say who else feels this way? And then we would say who else feels this way? And the other thing I did with my roadmap is, you know, we would meet every day with the engineers, but on Mondays we would be going through the, you know, sprint of the week or the month or whatever, like what are we working on right now? And on the back end, karen and I were constantly triaging what we're going to be building next or fixing, and then I would post those things in the Facebook group.
Stacee:I would say here is the order of the next five things coming down the pipe and do you agree with the order? And people would give me lots of comments know, oh, we want this feature. I'm like, okay, do you want it before this or after this one? It's like the eye doctor test. You're like A or B, because I can't do it all. So you tell me, do you want chat first or do you want, you know, to customize some reminder first? And no, we want chat. Okay, perfect. So that's the order. And it was nice because people are always asking you for more and you can just say, well, here's the plan. And we published it and I thought it worked really well. Some people were nervous like competitors would get it, but I'm like I don't really care about that competitors would get it, but I'm like I don't really care about that.
Ira:We used to have this dynamic where we always wanted to build, you know, lots of different cool things into our product. I think that's probably the way a lot of founders are, and so we would just start talking about wanting to do this, I want to do this, I want to do this, and and our partner, who was software developer, yeah, he would eventually stop us and he would just sort of say, okay, guys, like let's just pretend we've got, you know, these eight boxes of these eight different ideas we're talking about, and I'm giving you one golden token and you get to put it in one box that you want me to build. Which one's it gonna be? And that was a very difficult exercise for us.
Stacee:It's hard, it's hard. That's why I think a lot of people bite off more than they can chew. They get too many things going on and they aren't able to control the roadmap. That well, okay. Well, let's hop over to our favorite part of the program, where we will share a tip or trick or tool or quote what do you got for us today?
Ira:I would love to recognize somebody I can't believe I haven't called out during this segment yet, and that is my very best friend and first business partner, M mauricio, who has taught me way more than one could imagine and, you know, frankly, been one of the most important things in my life, both related and unrelated to starting a company, and I think what he taught me more than anything was to kind of be bold and, instead of really asking the question of you know, why should I do this? Or you know like it was like, you know why not us that sort of notion?
Ira:of if nobody else is doing something that we know we need, why shouldn't we be the ones?
Ira:And you know, I had a lot of answers to that question, like because we're dumb and we're students and we don't know what we're doing and there's lots of smarter people and we've never done this before and all those things. But yeah, I think he really taught me like those are all stupid excuses, Like they make a ton of sense to me, but the reality is they're stupid excuses and if you really want to figure something out and do it, you can.
Stacee:Yeah, that's really good. How about you, S stacey? I'm going to share just a tip for when you're overwhelmed with decision-making. Like, just decide. I mean it sounds easy and simple, but actually just make a decision. Gather the information as quickly as possible. First you might have to figure out what information to gather, get it and make the decision, even if you don't know what the right decision is like. You will spend so much time trying to not make a mistake that you lose precious time when you could be moving forward and trust your gut. I mean, I think if you have a good pulse on the problem and you know what you're building kind of your end game you got to believe in yourself at some of these points, because people will doubt you. They will want to get more focus groups together and more information and while all of that is, I'm not saying it's bad, but sometimes there are just so many decisions to make You're just going to have to make a decision and go.
Ira:Love it. I have a. I was saying that people usually get, but occasionally it backfires when, um, there's too much discussion about something which is, uh, I say maybe we should form a committee. And anybody that knows me knows that that is absolutely not said seriously, cause there's nothing that I probably sort of viscerally dislike more than having to form a committee to figure something out that just needs to get figured out. Occasionally, somebody agrees with me when I say something and when I say that, and it really backfires, but most of the time it helps.
Stacee:Well, you know, there was a lady I was listening to recently and she said just flip a coin on some of these things, Because you know what. You don't know what the other choice would have been anyways.
Dr. Ellen Langer:Rather than waste your time being stressed over making the right decision, make the decision right. Randomly choose. Now you can randomly choose if you want an Almond Joy or a Snickers. Nobody's going to care. Right? It's the exact same thing about getting married or not, taking the job or not. You can only live one life. If there were some magical way that I could live a life as somebody who's had three kids and somebody who hasn't had kids, maybe I can make a comparison. But you don't have that available to you. So I say to my students should you go to Harvard or should you go to Yale? So they made a decision to go to Harvard. So let's say it's terrible. Oh, I wish I had gone to Yale. There's no way of knowing that Yale wouldn't have been worse, better the same. And that's why regret is so mindless, because the choice you didn't take, you're presuming would have been better.
Stacee:All right, well, let's spin the wheel and we'll see what the question is for next week.
Ira:Let's do it. How did you decide on titles?
Stacee:Oh man, I've changed so many people's titles so many times because I had no idea what I was doing.
Ira:My goodness, this is like my least favorite topic.
Stacee:I can't wait to discuss it. All right, we'll see you next week, take care. out episodes two and three, and if you are an accidental entrepreneur and would like to be a guest co-host on the show and spin the wheel, just message beacohost no spaces to 1-833-463-9727 and tell us your story. See you next time.