How to ask questions/get feedback from users before there is a product?
I'm interested in asking questions/getting feedback from users before I have a product. What are some approaches you've taken and what has succeeded/failed? Any insights, ideas, or resources would be great, thanks!
I did something similar to Kat Huang. I reached out to around 50 people over LinkedIn, also making clear I wasn't trying to sell anything. I had phone conversations with around 8 people, I even managed to get a personal meeting with someone in my target group. One of them became a close connection who's sent us some leads our first customer came out of that first round of calls, and some are now in our pipeline.
I wasn't trying to get feedback on my product because we didn't have a product. Instead, I was trying to understand how they were solving the problem I wanted to solve and their buying process if they decided to pay to solve that problem.
For b2b, I've had success cold emailing people in the relevant industry. Cold emailed ~30 people, got 5 or 6 responses. I made it clear I wasn't trying to pitch or sell anything and was only doing user research, which I think made people more receptive to talking to me. If its b2c, I would source from your friends & family, reach out to the demographic via forums, reddit, etc.
Yep, saying you're just doing user research does get people to warm up to you!
Good question. It does depend on the type of problem you're tackling and niche. In general, go where the members of your target market are most likely to congregate.
For example, say you're building a primarily B2C app to help busy office workers preorder their food. In this case it's actually a marketplace (restaurants and foodies),so you could go to restaurants directly and speak to the owners. And find busy lunch spots with a lot of office workers and ask them for feedback. This is actually something I did for a previous project - fun times ;)
If it's more B2B, the narrower your niche, the easier it becomes to find people to speak to. For example, if you're building a solution for solar panel installers, you could make a list of all of the local ones and contact them one by one. Yep, I did this too ;) I've actually written an article on this going in depth. Happy to answer any questions.
The key is to understand who you're targeting, find out where they are and get them to give you a few minutes of their time! Most people like to be helpful, so it's not as difficult as it sounds.
try https://betalist.com :)
I think IH can be useful in this regard...
And I can't resist not to give you a link to my own project which is entirely dedicated to getting opinions/feedback...
For instance: https://ratesome.com/topic/App-idea
Hope it will help.