How do you get unbiased opinions on your product?
This is something I have been thinking about a lot recently as I go into beta. Particularly the method to get information. Here are a few concerns or points I have been thinking about on this.
- Asking for feedback anonymously. On the plus side, this could lead to more true answers however if someone leaves feedback that you would like to action it is hard to track down who gave this to you.
- Do you get feedback on a call or via a form? If you do a call it is more conversational and you can find insights that you may not have uncovered with the current questions. If you do a form, however, the human component is removed making it easier for someone to provide a more blunt answer.
- Asking opened ended questions. People are less likely to answer 10 open-ended questions as they are 10 yes/no. If you, do however, ask open-ended questions people have the option to think more about the product and respond with something they may have not considered previously.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on these points. I don't think any of these points are more valid than the other and I imagine that a combination of these methods is needed.
Trending on Indie Hackers
Some great thoughts here @Edward_Johnson
I've come from a research background so I'm always interested in reading stories and thoughts like these.
Gaining feedback is easy.
Gaining credible and robust feedback is hard work, but worth every penny!
Here’s my framework to customer feedback success:
You need to decompose a simple “choice” into 3 buckets:
What were the things the customer saw (observations) which led them to believe something (inferences) and then to act on it (conclusion)
I'd say that the method doesn't really matter as long as you're talking to people who actually need your product.
Most of our feedback comes from our support chat.
I can say for a certainty that the feedback given there is completely unbiased.
When you're talking to people who need your tool, there are no biased opinions.
If you already have a product with active users, talk to those users.
Otherwise, find your target audience in communities like Reddit and send a message asking if they'd find your product/what it solves useful.
That's worked for me in the past.