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Ask HN: What do you do to receive honest feedback for your products?

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Re: Ask HN: What do you do to receive honest feedback for your products?

#32
Presumably if you are building something for a domain, you know some people who are working in that domain. Don't ask those friends, ask them to recommend their least tactful colleague, the one who knows everything about everything, and can't keep their opinions to themself.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do to receive honest feedback for your products?

#33

I’ve noticed that asking leading _negative_ questions opens up people a lot. Me: “The lights are too bright, right?” (Hardware product) User: “No they are fine but I wish the display was larger.” I think questioning like this makes user comfortable criticising you.

I was going to mention something similar! People by nature (usually) don't want to offend anyone, hence white lies and such.

I've found by starting with my own insult/complaint, people feel more comfortable to open up a bit.

Not just specific to products, btw, but anything you want an honest opinion on.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do to receive honest feedback for your products?

#34
I have an exit survey on my Chrome extension, which loads automatically upon uninstall. People who hate the extension, or hate aspects about it, are more than happy to provide such feedback. Sometimes with obscenities.

One thing that people complained about was price, so I decided to ask people what price they thought was fair, from a list of three options (50% off, 75% off, and 99¢/yr). I then offered them a coupon code at whatever price they indicated was fair.

After offering this for years, and with over a thousand people going through this branch of the survey (which required saying that cost was the primary reason for uninstall), only a handful took me up on the discount. My takeaway from this is that lots of people will say that something should be X% cheaper, but nearly all of those people would not buy it even if it were that price.

Having learned this lesson, I no longer offer the uninstall discount, or many discounts at all.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do to receive honest feedback for your products?

#37
It shouldn't happen like this in the first place. Before building something, you should already have access to your target audience. There are many ways of solving this. E.g. doing consulting and building a list of clients with a similar problem. Starting out to build a solution without this makes it just so much more likely that you build something that doesn't solve a real problem or there's no buying interest. Ideally, you can build for a group of clients who are ready to pay when you give them an MVP.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do to receive honest feedback for your products?

#38
If you have a product but no users at all, I think you should go back to the step of idea validation. Make sure what you're building is something that people might use in the first place.

Multiple ways to do this.

Th easiest, imo, is to set up a simple landing page for your idea. Know before-hand who might be interested in your product, if it's just a handful of people, that works too. Just prepare for a lot of manual work (getting in touch with people and conversing about your product in different ways without making it seem like some sort of an ad), at least until your first 1000 users, more so for the first 500 (assuming your end-users are individuals and not businesses).

Re: Ask HN: What do you do to receive honest feedback for your products?

#40

I’ve noticed that asking leading _negative_ questions opens up people a lot. Me: “The lights are too bright, right?” (Hardware product) User: “No they are fine but I wish the display was larger.” I think questioning like this makes user comfortable criticising you.

I've been doing this for a while now. Good thing is, my audience is developers, so the feedback is detailed whenever I point something out to start a conversation.

The next step is to just differentiate between actual feedback and opinions that are intertwined in so much of the information the user could pass to you haha.

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