The key to creating a successful business is to offer products and services that people want. There has to be a match between what you are offering and what customers need.

This concept sounds obvious, but not getting early customer feedback is the primary reason why many ventures fail before they begin. As Steve Blank has said, you have to get out of the building and talk to customers.

This process is called customer discovery and customer development.

There is an incredibly valuable book on this subject called Talking to Humans. Its by Giff Constable.

The book has profoundly insightful and entertaining illustrations that the authors generously allow me to use. They are by the talented artist Tom Fishburne.

These cartoons poke fun at common customer development mistakes. I will post some of them throughout the rest of this article. Understanding what not to do will save you and your projects from myriad cul de sacs of frustration. Don’t waste time and money building products that your customers may or may not want.

Potential customers are the most relevant source of feedback and insight for refining your product ideas. The holy grail of startups is achieving product/market fit.

Surveys and Questionnaires

A great way to do customer discovery and customer development are to use questionnaires and surveys. There are web-based services that allow you to create surveys that query potential customers. You can then analyze the results.

You can access potential responders from your email list, social media, or through the service provider. An excellent tool to begin customer discovery is to use is SurveyMonkey.

The terms Survey and Questionnaire are relatively synonymous and interchangeable, but let’s differentiate the two because that is what marketers do; they differentiate.

This differentiation between the two terms is by no means definitive. Still, it gives a sense of how to approach two concepts of querying customers to gather information for segmentation and targeting.

A survey is a more general term than a questionnaire. Oxford Dictionaries define a survey as: “a general view, examination, or description of someone or something.” Survey techniques include observation, research, and sounding of opinion. A survey is the result of open-ended questions. Here you are doing qualitative research.

A questionnaire is a set of printed or written questions with a choice of answers, devised for analysis or statistical study. This process is more quantitative research. The assembled results of these fixed responses can be quantified and expressed as a percentage or other number.

Quantified results are clearer to communicate and actionable.

In both cases, you can get customer feedback on products and services. You can solicit suggestions about what else you can provide and what they feel is important about what you are doing or propose to do.

A caveat is that customers don’t always know what they want or need. Henry Ford remarked that if he asked people what they needed, they would have told him a faster horse. In many cases, people can’t conceive of the benefits of something they have never known.

You can also couch questions in a way to get potential customers excited about your motives by inquiring into their dreams and aspirations. You can use a questionnaire as a marketing tool to promote engagement with customers.

You must also be aware and take care of the biases inherent in the sample group you are questioning. If they are your social media contacts, then they are self-screened in a certain way.

If they are from your email list, then the ones who initially signed up based on your free give away, or lead capture strategy, are predisposed to your value proposition. The ones that have stayed and not unsubscribed fans of the content you have been providing.

Find some sample sets that are not biased toward your offerings. Don’t preach to the choir.

You can get less immediately biased groups from the survey provider like Survey Monkey.

You can spot trends, identify preferences, prioritize feature sets for Minimal Viable Product, refine marketing, and messaging based on questionnaire results.

Talking to customers and getting their feedback is entrepreneurship 101.

Be aware and ensure to temper the customer feedback by taking into account potential biases and preferences of the group responding.

Good luck road-testing your ideas!

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