B2C Customer Development, part 2 of 3: Finding Users for Testing
You have a B2C product. You may have a specific target audience in mind, or you may be building something that you think will have mass appeal. Nonetheless, for testing purposes, you need to define a target audience – and then aim slightly wide.
Even if your product will be mainstream and have mass appeal, you will need to find the early adopters first. An early adopter is not a fixed personality type. It is easy to think that you are looking for the gadget-nut who always tries out the latest and coolest things, and while you can certainly get an alpha-type like that interested in your alpha-version, you should focus on finding the potential product champions among your target audience. If they like it, who do you think will recommend your product to 20 others? Who will go out of their way to convert their friends into using your product? These power users will be ready to adopt your product early, and it will be beneficial for both of you to do so.
Once you have identified who these people could be, you should expand your description of a user champion. You want to find people that very roughly fit this description. This is because at this point you have a core audience hypothesis. You want to test whether that holds or whether you should be going after a slightly different audience. If you only talk to the people you are sure fit the bill exactly, you risk merely validating your hypothesis, not challenging it. If we insist on being lean and following “scientific principles” in creating startups, we should be conscious of theory falsification, not merely theory validation. You can always find a sample that concurs with the hypothesis, but this should not be your goal. Go wide with your sample.
And where do you find users for testing? Friends of friends should be your first call. Ask for introductions to people you do not know too well, especially if your friends think they can find people who are in the target audience of your product. This should be a quick source of leads, but it can also be quickly exhausted. My favourite tool for finding outsiders for user testing and research is Facebook advertising. You can define exactly the kind of people you are looking for, give them information upfront (on, say, a Facebook event page that details when the user testing will take place) and it costs you a few euros per lead.
As a side note, unlike some books on lean startups, I would recommend that you do not aim for tens and tens of customer interviews. Set a minimum quantity you want to talk to, but go for quality and insight instead of a short problem-centered interview. If you get to the core needs that your product will address, and figure out how you can make meeting these needs effortless, you don’t need a statistically significant sample size to validate this. You can, of course, but unless you like repetition, don’t include it in the qualitative research you do early on.
The first part of this short series on B2C Customer Development was on prototyping. Next, we’ll consider landing page and other pre-release material in B2C Customer Development.
Mikko Järvenpää, Marketing Geek, HackFwd
