Getting Feedback.

Today we’re talking about the best places to get early feedback on your product or service.

1. Your personal network. Friends and friends of friends are far and away the best place to get early feedback. This is because your existing personal relationship both gives you access to their time and, hopefully, an honest opinion. Be sure to give them the freedom to speak plainly.

2. Asking for advice. This is cold outreach to people within your target market — the potential users. But rather than ask them to try or buy your offering, you’re going to ask them for advice. Tell them you need their deep insights as you’re building a product just for them.

3. Some other channels that founders often use are: conferences — try to hustle for a free ticket if you can, and for those with relevant industry experience — consulting and content marketing can also work very well.

Best of luck out there.

Today we’re talking about how to use your personal network to get early feedback on your product.

1. Friends in the Industry.
If you have friends who work in the market, you’re addressing or might be potential customers, talk to them early. They will be a valuable source of honest feedback. If you don’t have friends directly in that market, meet with your friends in adjacent industries and ask if they know anyone.

2. Your Affinity Networks.
Tap into your high school, college, and former employer networks. For each of those, you should ask the head of development or the alumni club presidents and event hosts for their suggestions. And if you’re still able to post to old email lists, hit those too.

3. Close Friends and Family.
Regardless of their experience, those who are closest to you will often be called upon to provide you with feedback on your product’s first flows, messaging, and design.

Best of luck out there.

Today we’re talking about how to get early customer feedback by asking for advice.

1. Make a list of the people you want to reach. Then use one of the many services out there to get their email address or find them on LinkedIn.

2. Send them a personalized note highlighting their incredible experience, detailing how you’re building a product just for them and that you’d love to have them on board as an advisor.

3. Schedule meetings with those that reply, which can sometimes be more than 25%! In those meetings, ask about the problems they’re facing, share your product’s current progress and ask for their feedback.

Best of luck out there.

Today we’re talking about some other channels you can use to get feedback on your product.

1. Conferences — Industry conferences are a great way to meet potential customers and get lots of quick feedback, as well as make ongoing connections. Try to hustle for free tickets or just take meetings near the conference if your budget is tight.

2. Consulting and Content — If you have existing industry expertise on your team, offering that as a service or sharing your thoughts via content creation can help generate interest and get feedback.

3. Ads and Cold Email — I don’t like these channels, but they are used often. Cold Email allows you to send hundreds, if not thousands, of messages, but I worry that you burn through lead lists too quickly. Ads can also generate lots of leads too, but they’re expensive and will shorten your company’s runway.

Best of luck out there.

Today we are talking about how to get feedback on your first versions.

1. Don’t try to build the full app immediately.
Instead, start with screenshots of a workflow, then collect feedback, make edits and after a few rounds, you might create a basic interactive UI and then move to a simple experiment with real data.

2. The feedback will be broad.
Expect your first “customer advisors” to provide a wide range of feedback, take note of it all but should focus your attention on the feedback that is repeated often.

3. Keep the top of the funnel fresh.
Making sure there’s a regular flow of new potential customers providing feedback allows you to confidently move away from those that aren’t working out. We want to keep cycling through leads to find those most interested to help, as they often become the first real customers.

Best of luck out there.

Today, we’re talking about minimizing the work for your first version.

1. First, start with a basic workflow based on screenshots. You will have to iterate on those many times to get good feedback, but then you can build out an interactive prototype. Most founders use tools like Figma during this time.

2. Next, we move up to a simple experiment using real data. Try to keep the test small and narrowly focused on one problem to be solved. A lot of teams use no-code tools like Bubble, Retool, and Zapier to avoid having to deploy working code in this phase.

3. Lastly, stay focused on the most engaged customers rather than any broader distribution. You’ll need these early customers to be naturally very excited in order to tolerate all the bugs and delays they will experience.

Best of luck out there.