What's your question-to-answer flow when it comes to your startups?
If you have a question about things like PR, marketing, MVP, pricing and other questions related to your business: how do you organize your search for information and recommendations? Do you come to IH first? Google first? IH second? maybe Quora?
I actually ask my target users first about all these things. At the end of the day, I don't care what anybody other than my target customers feel about the messaging, the pricing, the branding, etc. So, I go find some of those folks and I ask them directly. Once I learn some, THEN I'll browse the web looking for companies who fall in similar categories, and use them for inspiration.
Ahh thanks - let's say your existing customers said " I'd really like real-time notifications when X happens" - how do you get more info on that to get it implemented in your app or product? do you think" I need to have push notifications on my app. How do I do that? Is there a saas for that?" And Google that? Or come here for advice?
"Push notification" is an implementation. You need to make sure you understand the value the user is looking for. In this case, it might be that the user wants to know as soon as Thing happens.
Next thing I would think through: Does Thing happen when the user is at the computer? When they're in your app? When they're driving to work? Depending on the user context, the different solutions you could look for might vary greatly.
I'd try to find out more about how and when the user would want to know something, then start to craft your hunt. "Send notification to user's phone" will point you to different research than "Send notification to user's desktop browser." Once you know the specific problem you're trying to solve, it can be easy to search for.
As an example of something I just worked through, one of my clients swore she wanted Text messages to be sent to her users when something happened. I urged for more research, and we found that the only time users would see the notification was during the workday, when checking their phone was discouraged. It was much better for them to receive emails. So, instead of taking dev time to integrate to Twilio and build that whole thing, we just use email notifications. Win-win for everybody.
perfect, thanks!