Startup Marketing Blog – By Sean Ellis

Free Customer Development Help – Survey.io

I’m excited to announce a project that I’ve been working on with KISSmetrics called Survey.io, which provides startups with a free and easy way to prepare, distribute and analyze an initial customer development survey. It includes the content of the survey I use to verify that a startup is ready for the 12in6 Metrics Driven Customer Development Program (which begins at the validation step in Steve Blank’s Four Steps to the Epiphany). 

Determine if you are ready to scale

For startups, this survey is an ideal way for you to determine if you should begin the final preparations before aggressively scaling customer acquisition.  Some VCs have also started using Survey.io as part of their diligence before making Series B investments – so don’t be surprised if a VC asks you for your Survey.io results.

The most important question for determining how well your product is resonating with early users is question 2:

2) How would you feel if you could no longer use [product]?

• Very disappointed
• Somewhat disappointed
• Not disappointed (it isn’t really that useful)
• N/A – I no longer use [product]

If most of your respondents are saying that they would only be “somewhat disappointed” without your product, they are really telling you that it is only a “nice to have”.  When asking users why they selected this answer, I often find that they are focused on commodity aspects of the product and they know of a replacement product.  It’s very difficult to build a business around a “nice to have” product, so you should keep burn and customer flow low while you iterate your core experience. 

If however, you find that around 50% or more of your users are saying that they would be “very disappointed” without your product, there is a great chance you can build a successful business on this “must have” product.  This is the time to reallocate some development resources to optimizing first time user flows and building the tracking/reporting systems needed to effectively scale customer acquisition initiatives. 

Survey.io to develop value proposition

The survey also provides some useful early feedback for verifying use cases, developing your value proposition and positioning against the most common alternative solutions.  This feedback is directionally useful, but I recommend significantly more research (via customer surveys and interviews) before finalizing your value proposition and positioning.

I strongly encourage you to setup and run your own customer development survey via Survey.io.  It only takes a few minutes and it free.  Here’s the link again.

And here’s a link to my customer development survey for Startup-Marketing.com .  I’d really appreciate it if you could take the time to complete it.  This will help me tailor the content of this blog to better meet your needs.

Posted in 12in6, 12in6 Methodology, Acquiring Customers, Competitors, Customer Development, Research, Steven Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, VC.