Offer to keep the menus up to date for them yourself, for a price. Now you know how much they’ll be willing to pay for a solution, and you’re in a nice position to develop your product from (that will replace you).
Ask HN: How to do market research for product?
51–60 of 123 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to do market research for product?
#52I feel like a weird industry has popped up that makes you feel like you can validate everything in advance. I think this comes from Product Managers in large, risk-averse companies that excessively try to minimize mistakes. However, if you want to start a startup, you aren't optimizing for mistake minimization! You are figuring out if anyone cares as quickly as possible. You will only get true validation of this by s…
I agree with this! I think its great that you're trying to ask people for advice but honestly you want to maximise your learning from your potential customers themselves! The book 'The Lean Startup' mentions "faster learning loops" where you try to build something as fast as possible, find out whats wrong, iterate. - Book summary here: https://tdevroome.medium.com/book-summary-the-lean-startup-2...
Re: Ask HN: How to do market research for product?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a good book that helps deal with those issues: https://www.momtestbook.com/
Thank you for this one. Haven’t read it, but despite doing engineering and product work for decades I’m always grateful for books like this as there is always more to learn! Looks great! Any other must haves in this category?
Michele Hansens "Deploy Empathy" is an excellent complementary to The Mom Test.
Re: Ask HN: How to do market research for product?
#54Be very careful about how you ask questions because some forms of question solicit "approval" answers. It's culturally informed, some cultures try very very hard NOT to have to deliver a negative. Thats why some UX uses matched-pair questions which have two approaches to the issue at hand, boolean opposites, so you can see if they move sliders, weight or answer both the "correct" way to align the response. Separately…
Be very careful about how you ask questions because some forms of question solicit "approval" answers. It's culturally informed, some cultures try very very hard NOT to have to deliver a negative. This is one of those things that Steve Blank tries to address with the "Million dollar question." He suggests something like this (paraphrased from memory) 1. Ask your prospect (this assumes you've identified a prospect and…
What's your advice on doing this for products in rapidly changing markets?
Example: Say you are an AI graduate who has worked in AI for a while before ChatGPT.
Suddenly a competitor spins up something you were also developing - faster with ChatGPT - no problem, you launch it too.
One month later, 20 more competitors have popped up, but none really gained too much share. It seems ok.
Two months later, a competitor with funding launches, but now the product is free.
You start losing users to FreeComp, who also buy conference attention.
Your users say well, if you add this advanced feature - then we'll pay - but not now we can go to FreeComp.
Can you trust that? For how long? How would you weight it?
Re: Ask HN: How to do market research for product?
#551. Ask people how much they will buy it (with their money), not if it's a good idea.
2. When they don't want to buy, ask why.
Re: Ask HN: How to do market research for product?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Be very careful about how you ask questions because some forms of question solicit "approval" answers. It's culturally informed, some cultures try very very hard NOT to have to deliver a negative. This is one of those things that Steve Blank tries to address with the "Million dollar question." He suggests something like this (paraphrased from memory) 1. Ask your prospect (this assumes you've identified a prospect and…
What's your advice on doing this for products in rapidly changing markets? Example: Say you are an AI graduate who has worked in AI for a while before ChatGPT. Suddenly a competitor spins up something you were also developing - faster with ChatGPT - no problem, you launch it too. One month later, 20 more competitors have popped up, but none really gained too much share. It seems ok. Two months later, a competitor wit…
This is why I dislike when people gloss lovingly on product market fit. PMF is only part of the problem, an interesting indicator, and possible decision making support construct. But that's it.
Markets change, many evaporate or at least lead an accerated decay. Sometimes you double down on the decaying market, as the correct decision. Organizations have abandoned products, markets, or even invested in complete pivots as a result.
There's single right answer.
Re: Ask HN: How to do market research for product?
#57Okay take this with a big bucket of salt, took a year off from work last year and my initial idea was build something(failed miserably, total disaster, will try again sometime in future) but since I was totally unaware of how the whole marketing and market research thing works, I tried summarizing [0] everything at a very high level to get started, it helped a bit both when trying to build whatever the heck i tried t…
Excellent summary, clear, concise, complete. Well done!
Re: Ask HN: How to do market research for product?
#58Helpful ideas in thread. Thanks!
Re: Ask HN: How to do market research for product?
#59Don't overthink it, just get out there and talk to people. The more the better. In my experience, the limiting factor on day 1 is a lack of information, so your job is to learn until it's fairly obvious what to do. Thinking doesn't really generate new data, only action can, so walk into every restaurant you come across, write cold emails, etc.
As far as how to conduct these sorts of interviews goes, a few people have mentioned the mom test - it's v short and simple but it is indeed good. People, for the most part, avoid conflict and so don't give you honest feedback. Instead they tend to be complimentary, but non-committal. As a result, you need to be a little indirect in your line of questioning, and pay more attention to what they do than what they say.
When it comes to testing a product, try and deliver the value manually instead. Businesses don't buy software, they buy solutions to problems. Software is just a way to deliver the solution to many customers. If you can't convince someone to pay you to keep their menu up to date by hand, they won't pay for your software to do it either. Perhaps you convince them to give you the relevant credentials to update menus across platforms yourself, and then they email you when something changes, or you give them a google form, or you go into the restaurant every day and ask what's new. Not everyone is open to working with someone in a scrappy way like this, but you'd be surprised.
You can easily serve a handful of customers manually like this, which will give you the data you need to decide if it's worth it, and the data you need to build the product.
Anyway, good luck!
Re: Ask HN: How to do market research for product?
#60I feel like a weird industry has popped up that makes you feel like you can validate everything in advance. I think this comes from Product Managers in large, risk-averse companies that excessively try to minimize mistakes. However, if you want to start a startup, you aren't optimizing for mistake minimization! You are figuring out if anyone cares as quickly as possible. You will only get true validation of this by s…
I agree with all of this.
The vast majority of people aren’t good at being visionary, most aren’t technical, and many will give you a default culturally-aligned answer (eg positive to be nice and conflict-averse, or negative because they are tired of dealing with sales and bullshit, for example).
Therefore having some sort of MVP (even as said just a spreadsheet, or a storyboard) to help people understand what you’re even talking about and envision it in action, would be very useful.