Too often I have seen entrepreneur trying to understand their customer need by sending them … a survey.
“Please rank those feature in order of preference”
Because surveys capture what people say – which is different from how they behave – they don’t provide insightful data.
Worst, they provides data that too is easily misinterpreted and lead wrong insights…
The most useless survey question I have ever seen:
How much will you pay for a service that does such and such…
Whatever the answer, make sure you ignore it.
I have seen 2 rare occasions of useful surveys:
- to (scientifically) pick the best domain name
- to measure the customer pain. An entrepreneur sent a very long and boring survey his potential early adopters. When the results came back, he did not look at the actual answers but at how many people actually finished the survey. A direct measure of how much trouble they are will go through to get a closer to the solution to their problem. A measure of their pain. He then identifies the most eager early adopters.
Both of those examples are about validation, not discovery.
What do you think ? Do you have other examples of survey that worked ?