Public Survey vs Customer Interviews pre MVP.
So I recently read The Lean Product Playbook and before actually starting to code an MVP, I want to know if the market really needs the Product. In order to gather feedback I have prepared a Questionnaire. But, I am confused, whether I should open the questionnaire to my network, such as LinkedIn / Twitter & Co. or shall I shortlist customers, schedule calls and interview them.
The former will give me responses quickly, but responses will just be a survey whereas the latter will be more beneficial, may be even probable customer(s), but will take more time.
Question 2: I have made a very hacky PoC and I am thinking maybe code a cleaner mock MVP and record a short screencast just to show how it might look like when working?! Has anyone done that as well? Would that be beneficial?
Something inside me still wants to code the MVP, please suggest what you had done! Especially technical founders.
Thank :)
I think it depends more on the hypotesis you're trying to validate.
Example: "People are open to paying a convenience tax for the confort of buying a ticket from home" seems like a hypotesis that you can validate (before practice) in a quantitative research like a survey, asking something like "Would you pay X for a Y-worth ticket if you could buy it online?"
"People have a bad experience in buying tickets in person" is something more experiential, that requires a deeper investigation like an interview about the person's experience in buying tickets in person, a qualitative research. How does the person react when I say that she could buy tickets online on my platform? How does that solve their problem?
I recommend you doing both, with different hypotesis. I am not a dev, and did a mockup on Canva and Invision to show people, including the ones that are working with me today. On the research side, I did surveys and interviews, some extended ones and other short ones. It's good to differentiate the hypotesis you're trying to validate and see which research format adapts to each of them.
Good luck! Customer Development is super important. Knowing the customer is what differentiates us from the other solutions. If u didn't, give Steve Blank a read, "4 steps to epiphany"
It's a B2B product. I like your idea of doing both with different hypothesis.
Thanks for book advice, always love a good book :)
I have done both, more on the survey side. Survey results can be validating or not, and flattering or not. They can uncover interesting opportunities, especially in a B2C or B2B2C project. However, for real financial feasibility, I think it's going to be more telling to try and line up some calls to ask about pain points, suggest you're building something and ask if they'd like to try it. At least, this is the approach I will take in my latest project. I tend to see what I want to see from survey results :)
Thanks.