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How I Used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to Validate my Startup Idea

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Re: How I Used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to Validate my Startup Idea

#3
cool. My girlfriend had an idea about startup and we started discussing it. At some point I told her 'lets stop hand-waving and look at some data' . For ~10 bucks we got 110 good responses to 11-question survey on Mechanical Turk. It really gave us new perspective on some of our problems. That was much easier than asking our friends for feedback (which we did too).

Re: How I Used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to Validate my Startup Idea

#4
post #2

The post would be more interesting if we knew what questions were asked in the survey. Edit: I meant how exactly were the survey looked like, including the service description. If it's a paid service, I highly doubt the 73% figure.

It's right there in the post:

I gave a brief description of what the website/service offering would be then asked the users:

   Gender
   Age
   Would they use the service as described above
   Give me 3 examples of how they would use the service.
   General feedback or ideas on the service, why they would or would not use it.*

Re: How I Used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to Validate my Startup Idea

#5
It's not clear from the article what kind of business model the Startup in question is planning to use. This is relevant, as the fact the 73% of random strangers said they would "use the service as described" doesn't give any indication that they'd be willing to pay for it.

Clearly, the author got his $27.50 worth; how much that's really worth, though, in the long term, remains to be seen.

Re: How I Used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to Validate my Startup Idea

#6
Strange use of Mechanical Turk if you ask me. You could've spent about the same in Google Adwords asking people to take a survey. At least then you'd have a survey of "people who are searching for important keywords related to my topic of interest" rather "people who are so technically capable that they are using MT".

"I also found out to my surprise that more men than women said they’d use the service. I fully expected it to be the other way around." 200 people is not a large sample size and I would caution you against making sweeping decisions about the future of a company based on this small size. It could be that the MT program attracts more men than women? I don't know how you set it up but you said earlier that you didn't really do any segmentation.

Re: How I Used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to Validate my Startup Idea

#7
post #2

The post would be more interesting if we knew what questions were asked in the survey. Edit: I meant how exactly were the survey looked like, including the service description. If it's a paid service, I highly doubt the 73% figure.

or whether people in the target market were remotely likely to be found answering questions on Amazon Mechanical Turk...

Re: How I Used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to Validate my Startup Idea

#10

Strange use of Mechanical Turk if you ask me. You could've spent about the same in Google Adwords asking people to take a survey. At least then you'd have a survey of "people who are searching for important keywords related to my topic of interest" rather "people who are so technically capable that they are using MT". "I also found out to my surprise that more men than women said they’d use the service. I fully expec…

It is still waaaaaaaaaaay better than asking your family and friends.
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