Ryan is a cofounder of Hirely, a 9 month-old startup connecting small businesses and hourly job seekers. He got interested in startups in college, and has worked in various capacities in startups for much of his professional career. He took the leap and started his own.
Ryan and his cofounder are well-networked with small businesses in the area. They completed much of their customer validation before quitting their day jobs. The vast majority of their customer feedback has come from in-person interviews with local small businesses and hourly workers. They have also conducted MTurk surveys, and use platforms such as Reddit and Quora occasionally to explore broader interests. It is sometimes difficult for him to get in-person feedback, and online feedback is not targeted enough to be a decision-making tool.
In responding to the proposed solution, Ryan emphasized the need for numerical data to make decisions, and therefore be willing to pay for the service. Paid MTurk surveys work for Ryan and his cofounder because they can be scaled to a size that creates statistical significance. He said he would use the suggested solution as a free user occasionally in similar situations to the ones he would use Quora, but would need sufficient scale and access to particular user segments to make the leap to being a paid user.
Jeremy is the son of two parents that own a kite shop. Since a very young age, he has been interested in kites and in general toying around with hardware technology. He owns at least 25 kites of varying sizes and styles, many of which he has modified himself.
He is working on his own kite design, and is working with some technology faculty and other students interested in hardware to develop it. He says he doesn’t usually look for public feedback on his kites and probably won’t be interested in the future. He went to the meetup to improve his business skills.
Andrew has been to a few entrepreneurship meetups to examine his idea for a better political system. He has experience in the political realm, interning with a Senator on the hill both over the summer and during the school year for less time. He was always interested in politics since he was young and is a member of the Democratic Party, for which he will occasionally do fundraising calls.
He needs to get feedback to determine if people are willing to donate more to candidates on the condition they don’t accept money from larger donors. He has conducted in-person interviews of students at the college, but is looking for a wider variety of opinions.
He said he would use the solution if he could advertise it to groups he’s targeting to get a sufficient sample size with them, but worries that the results will be biased because they want to say they will do particular things. He might use it to ask questions than are less direct and more about opinions about politics in general as opposed to particular actions.
Meg has always been an animal lover, but leaving her pets at home was something that always bothered her. When her husband got a video tape to show to the dogs and cats when they were away, she was delighted that her pets were entertained despite her and her husband’s absence. She was inspired to work on an online solution with plenty of content.
Meg is in the early stages of customer validation. She is both looking to understand what her customers want in terms of programming and what would make a scalable model for the business (online streaming costs are expensive). She conducts in-person interviews and posts to online dog-lover and cat-lover forums. She believes the process could be easier, especially given that it can be difficult to find in-person events for dog-lovers and cat-lovers.
She is interested in getting as much feedback as possible for her idea. She was somewhat worried about the possibility of trolling both giving her bad information, and discouraging real potential customers from providing their feedback. She was willing to test a free solution.
Natalie started her own startup in high school, but has focused on her studies in college. Her startup served children’s science, math and humanities interests. She built it based on her experience wanting more projects to do because her school did not have much of a science curriculum.
Natalie did not find it easy to speak with lots of children to understand what the science/math/humanities kits should have included. She made friends with a principal and some teachers and faculty at her local elementary school to get in touch with children to interview. She then used her interviews to create prototypes and sent them home for free. Their parents were so impressed, it was easy to get sales, and she worked with the PTA to increase distribution and with her high school teachers to find students to work with her.
Natalie would use the solution, but wonders how she will know who is giving feedback. She would want to see the kinds of people that are giving feedback.
Steven was inspired by his cousin to work on startups. He worked as an intern when he was younger at his cousin’s startup and has multiple successful startups under his own belt. He is currently in customer validation for a new idea regarding social media videos. He is one of the organizers for the meetup.
Having done hundreds of customer interviews on his own in the past, Steven saw the tool as being more useful in a later stage, when he could get demographic data on a large number of users. He would want it to have built-in data analytics to help him determine the target customer. He would be willing to test a free MVP.
Anna is a first-time entrepreneur interested in minority health. She was inspired to the cause by her personal experience with diversity and health issues in her community, and by the passage of healthcare reform.
Anna is doing customer interviews for the first time and is not exactly sure of the particular problem she is solving. Conducting customer interviews for the first time is an intimidating process, not only because of the scale of the issue but also because of its potential controversial nature. She wants to find ways to get customer information reliably and get a broad understanding of the market.
Anna is interested in the idea, and would need to get information on the demographics of the people that responded to her prompts. Given the number of types of stakeholders she is looking to interview, she desires a platform that could get customer feedback from many groups. She would be willing to try a free MVP.
