Tag Archives: feedback

How to start building your user base

Posted by TecnoTribu on 26/03/2012 4 comments

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2012 Spring Edition. This post is from the TecnoTribu team, formed by Nieves Martínez Martín @ and Pedro Sánchez Pernia @

Congratulations! Your idea is now a real product, at least a MVP, and you are ready to show it to the world and grab some real users, not the ones that used to test the development version.

You want users, but you want their feedback at this point, so be sure to have in place some analytics tools to understand their behavior, and a minimum feedback channel available. That could be just a box showing a single email account or a phone number, or some ticketing system. You may try then some tools like yorespondo (phone) , zendesk, uservoice…

First in line:
Hopefully you started some time ago creating awareness of your product, through a coming soon website, an email list, a related blog or a twitter account. So, start with who already showed some interest, that’s the easy part, but it’s a nice beginning.

Make your own early adopters.
Stay away of the “usual suspects”, you know, those people that creates an account on any of each social network or online service available in the world.  Their motivation is mainly to spread their exact message or presence in every place. Don’t bet too much on their classic huge networks, and their potential virality. If you are doing well, they will probably come to you, without any effort from you, that’s just fine. You will easily identify real early adopters with a recurrent use of the platform, and cherish them as much as you can.

Trust unknown people, do not trust your friends. (Wait…What?)
Only their feedback, of course ;) … Your mom, neither your friends or relatives are not your customer target, even if they could be by age or behavior. They are just been “infected” by you, and they are not suitable as “samples”. That’s why you may leverage your personal network to REACH new users and not as users by themselves. They may help you to spread the word, so make it an easy task for them writing some email template or giving them some printed flyers to distribute. You may even ask them to act on their behalf online. It’s hard to find the limit of kindly asking… and actually embarrassing them.

Make your own influencers.
You may be tempted to do a trip to mount Olympus and try to get in touch with some influent-blogger, twitt-star, hipster-trendsetter, what-ever… It is relatively easy to contact them (the ego thing), but they may ask you something in return, so they will be “infected” as well. Furthermore, it’s too risky to be tied to a big partnership, or some big influencers. Keep the emotional ownership of your customer base.
You will test your real power of traction, when someone you doesn’t know – at all – recommends your product to his friends. THAT’s such a tipping point.

Your customers are just regular people.
Fortunately you may “won the lottery” in some point and attract some celebrity (you can’t afford otherwise) in your customer base, and experiment the “Justin Bieber effect“. But that will be just a consequence that you are doing fine, and because those guys want to get in touch with their audience, your users. That’s why you will probably try, by now, regular acquisition stuff (SEO, SEM, emailing…).

Once you start your database with the above techniques or with some other acquisition strategy, be an honest stalker and identify recurrent users. Figure out, HOW they came to you and WHY they are using your product. You will then get the best clues about HOW to reach other people like them.

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Post-Data: By the way, if I do not know you, you are lucky! Because you are not “infected”, and you are welcome to be “first in line” and sign up to our coming soon TecnoTribu website ;)

One Day in Tetuan Valley

Posted by execinterview on 30/11/2011 None comments

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2011 Fall edition. This post is from the ExecInterview team, formed by José María Estévez,Clifton Chestnut, Margit Sperling and Eva López.

Progress

I think the most important progress we have made in the last few weeks is the clarification of our vision and the solidification of our product´s scope and scale. We have been solidly developing our pitch and have had meetings with several people who work in HR departments to pick their brains about the potential draw for the product. We have been asking them if they believe that small and mid-sized companies will be willing to pay for online interview services and more specifically, for the kind of language evaluation services we hope to provide. The tech team members are hard at work on the platform and non-tech people have been working on consolidating our sales pitch and making sure that each of our main selling points meet the needs of consumers.

Feedback from week 5′s session

On Wednesday we received a lot of really helpful feedback. One of the most important points that we, like many other groups have to deal with, is the reporting of our expected revenue stream. We need to go back to the drawing board and simplify how we demonstrate our projected earnings and come up with a visual way to be both realistic and attention grabbing about our potential profits. We also want to incorporate the conversations we have had with the various HR people to highlight both how we have been laying the foundation for some good marketing and how our product really could stand to solve an important problem in the recruitment process. Furthermore, we need to clarify both visually (in the presentation) and amongst ourselves, what kind of companies will be our target market.

Looking towards the next session

We want to turbo-charge our pitch, especially the beginning. We want to do a better job of getting people on board right from the first slide. We have been thinking about some ways to accomplish this and have also been researching successful pitches and how to include personal “stories” or other attention grabbing strategies. We also want to make sure that both the process for using ExecInterview and the ways this service will help save time and money are extremely clear both for doing client sales pitches and for pitches to potential investors. We are looking forward to the prototype coming together and being able to share a more complete picture of the final product.

Reflections

Learning from the other groups and seeing the kind of progress the other groups have made is really amazing. It was great to see the team’s visions really coming together and the great work people have done on their presentations. Also, the opportunity to receive feedback from so many smart and experienced people who have taken an interest in helping everyone be the best they can be has been hugely helpful in encouraging our reflection and improvement process. When you are so closely involved in something it is hard to see things you would easily see in other projects, so the extra sets of eyes and ears has been truly helpful!

We are looking forward to next week and hope to bring down the house with our platform and updated presentation!

Listening to customers

Posted by toolme on 09/11/2010 1 comments

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2010 Fall edition. This post is from the toolme team, formed by Pedro Fraca Tarancón.

As everyone knows the product development model is not the best way to introduce a new product/service to the market. Steven Blanks talks about Customer Development Model, this model is centered on the early customer talk instead spent time developing a product that customer don’t need or does not fit customer needs.

Here in toolme we need to know features that customer needs to build our products. And we think that, before we build a product/service we must talk with potential customers/users.

You can use several ways to get customers feedback: phone, door to door, mail, advertising…. We believe in web technologies to do it, and is exactly what we did. It ss a cheap way to get fast and early stage feedback.

We need:

  • Online survey platform (i.e. google documents, monkey survey….),
  • Potential Customer/Users mails or another way to establish contact. I recommend to use an active linkedin group.
  • A present for one of the polled customer/user. With this we attract more users.

Now it is time to wait for responses and analyze data.

I will write here the response rate and percentage soon.