Results from my first customer survey

As the new owner of this business, I wanted to learn more about my customer's experiences with our main product, which is a life skills curriculum for (mostly) homeschool families.

Thankfully, when I acquired the business, they were pretty well setup in Ontraport to select contacts from among current or recent customers. I sent out an email to about 300 such contacts with a link to a 8-question Google Forms survey. I offered an incentive of a small kid-friendly prize a randomly drawn respondents.

I ended up with 48 responses, which seemed pretty good.

What I learned about my business:

• No surprise, customers love the idea of teaching their children life skills. That is the essence of the product. However, there are a significant number of people whose good intentions don't translate to a habit of utilizing our materials. There's probably a relevant comparison to the gym membership phenomenon, where developing the healthy habit is easier said than done.

• The curriculum content is currently packaged in a way where topics are essentially dripped sequentially over time. However, at this time people don't find it easy to browse the entire library of topics. This was a highly requested change.

• Even people who were less than pleased with overall usability still valued the content.

Conducting any kind of survey involves decisions about how much to ask, how to word the questions and how to structure the responses. Even though I'm sure I could have improved in some of these aspects, my major goal was accomplished: I got some great feedback to better understand the perceived strengths and weaknesses of the program.