Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

harperlindsey.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 60 posts

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

#41

Post by acangiano »

justinchen wrote: post #36
rkalla wrote: post #22

For anyone else interested in this "quick, cheap, feedback" cycle, PickFu is another service that does this: http://pickfu.com/ I spent about $20 to get 200 responses for my question, but only ended up collecting 103 answers before the question expired. None of this stuff is perfect, but employing a few of these approaches all at the same time will generate results that can be handy to correlate.

Actually, it didn't expire, it finished with 104 of 200 answers picking "B - Paypal" http://pickfu.com/00PULC Also, just to clarify, it's $17 for 200 responses. Thanks for trying out PickFu!

Thank you for doing this. Living outside of the US means that I cannot use the Amazon Mechanical Turk. I just launched a $17 test. If it works well, I'll use it again in the future.

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

#42

Post by snprbob86 »

yellowbkpk wrote: post #21
akshayubhat wrote: post #8

People who use AMT for earning money may not necessarily be the right audience you are looking for.

I don't think that people use Mechanical Turk as their sole source for money. If I remember correctly, someone figured out that mechanical turk pays roughly $5/hour if you spend your whole day doing it. That's not very much. Mechanical Turk seems to be filled with people itching for some community to participate in -- why not get paid for it at the same time?

I've run an MTurk survey as well and asked standard demographic information. My results are surprisingly in line with national averages. I ran the survey at the suggestion of someone with much more experience running MTurk surveys, who claims he has verified that the results are better than typical phone and mall campaigns.

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

#43

Post by mattew »

michael_dorfman wrote: post #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.

This isn't 73% of random strangers. This is 73% of the Mechanical Turk users who accepted the hit for this.

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

#44

Post by raquo »

yellowbkpk wrote: post #21
akshayubhat wrote: post #8

People who use AMT for earning money may not necessarily be the right audience you are looking for.

I don't think that people use Mechanical Turk as their sole source for money. If I remember correctly, someone figured out that mechanical turk pays roughly $5/hour if you spend your whole day doing it. That's not very much. Mechanical Turk seems to be filled with people itching for some community to participate in -- why not get paid for it at the same time?

In some countries $5/hour is a very good salary...

Even in Russia it's about the average income IIRC if you assume 40-hour workweek.

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

#45

Post by harperlindsey »

This is Lindsey - who wrote the post. I wanted to clarify a couple of things, based on the feedback I’m seeing here. (btw. This was my first blog post :)). I am still in stealth mode (which is a completely different conversation that I’ll be blogging about soon). www.Swayable.com will be a consumer facing free service. With that said, the Turk system will not work for a lot of startups that need niche specific data. I was looking for general consumers that are web/computer savvy and the Turk system fit the bill for what I needed. The most valuable feedback I got was actually from the text responses as opposed to the yes/no response. I will definitely follow up on this post as soon as I am out of stealth mode, and provide more specific data. Thanks for all the great feedback!

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

#46

Post by pbhjpbhj »

snprbob86 wrote: post #42
yellowbkpk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that people use Mechanical Turk as their sole source for money. If I remember correctly, someone figured out that mechanical turk pays roughly $5/hour if you spend your whole day doing it. That's not very much. Mechanical Turk seems to be filled with people itching for some community to participate in -- why not get paid for it at the same time?

I've run an MTurk survey as well and asked standard demographic information. My results are surprisingly in line with national averages. I ran the survey at the suggestion of someone with much more experience running MTurk surveys, who claims he has verified that the results are better than typical phone and mall campaigns.

>I've run an MTurk survey as well and asked standard demographic information. My results are surprisingly in line with national averages.

Do MTurkers tell the truth though? Presumably one person can run a dozen fronts so that they can answer questions that require a specific demographic. Or they masquerade as elderly females to appear more trustworthy and shame you out of objecting if they've not done the job properly or whatever.

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

#48

Post by jiganti »

mattew wrote: post #43
michael_dorfman wrote: post #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.

This isn't 73% of random strangers. This is 73% of the Mechanical Turk users who accepted the hit for this.

Exactly, this is very relevant. The type of person who stumbles upon your web app is isn't necessarily the type of person who decides a good use of their time is completing mechanical turk tasks. But as long as you're aware of this when considering your results, I suppose they can still be considerably valuable.
Post reply on HN