Getting to know my customers

JFDI…

Since I started out with  GoVJ, there has been one thing I’ve been meaning to do but for one reason or another I’ve put off. That has been surveying, and obtaining some qualitative information on my potential market and customers.

There are a few reasons I haven’t done this. Time, unsureness about what questions to ask, fear of putting my head above the line and talking to people, I already knew my target market, I was a user myself… the list can go on, but it all boils down to not really wanting to experience a little potential discomfort.

So, to kick off 2017 I decided it was time to get into it.

Survey Monkey is free for up to 10 questions. It seems to be the go-to for anyone who wants something doing quick. I know it can make research professionals wince for various reasons. For me it was ideal though, it’s quick and easy and lowered my bar to just ing doing it.I wrote out my 10 questions, and then got a good friend of mine,  Liam , to sense check and validate what I had wrote.

A little help is an awesome thing

If you want to get anyone to click through to something online, a picture is pretty much mandatory.

Liam is a kick-ass motion graphics artist, and also a dab hand at design. He knocked together a call to action graphic for me that took my app’s icon design and turned it into a megaphone. Whilst I’m capable of making my own graphics, I am often in developer mode rather than designer mode. This helped me just get the survey out without procrastinating. I’d strongly advise developers without the skills or time, to outsource this sort of work.

Using this graphic, and a simple call for participants. So that I could give something back to people, I combined this with reminding people that they can get some free video content if they sign up to my mailing list!

This was sent to two groups on Facebook, reddit, and I also sent an email out to my mailing list (~150 people) that I had built previously when launching the app.

So what happened?

I was really heartened with the community response. I’ve received 70 responses within 3 days. Whilst it’s unlikely to ever get enough responses in a niche like this to reach a high level of statistical certainty with any insights or conclusions, this is enough to give me some good indications.

There are some early insights I can see from scanning Survey Monkey’s graphs and summarisations:

* A future macOS product serving the same niche might be a valuable use of my time.
* There is a narrative in terms of how people are using iOS along with Macs, and their use of PCs also.

I believe I shall need to keep an eye on the market, and having presence on windows UWP might be worth considering in future. Prior to this I had considered Android as being my next best step at diversifying and expanding what I serve.

I plan on exploring this data further later on this week and that may be the subject of another blog post.