We've said it here before, and we'll say it here again: There's hundreds of ways a survey project can go totally wrong, and only one way it can go totally right. Surveys are delicate projects. You have one chance to pulse your target audience, and any mistakes in your survey logic can make your entire … Continue reading 5 Things to Avoid in Your Market Research Survey
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Look in a mirror. What do you see? According to psychologists, it’s not what your friends see. In fact, human beings are predisposed to see ourselves in a certain way, regardless of the facts of our appearance. It’s called the mere exposure effect, and it was first discovered in 1977. It goes like this: All … Continue reading The Mirror: A Startup’s Worst Enemy?
Our client asked us to help them predict the future. A tall order, for sure. But at PeopleFish, we hear this kind of thing all the time. When we launch our $10 subscription next month, how many subscribers can we expect? When we increase prices 10% in Q3, what will happen to sales? How will mothers … Continue reading How to Predict the Future with Market Research Surveys
This is tough to admit. We love surveys. We're all about surveys. We live, eat and breathe surveys. And we think you should love surveys, too. But the fact is, survey projects are extremely delicate. They're easy to mess up. One little mistake can make your entire dataset completely useless. And, unfortunately, it's more than … Continue reading The Problem with DIY Survey Projects
SurveyMonkey is an all-around great tool. It's tried and tested. It's been around since 1999---one of the earliest survey platforms on the internet. More than 25 million people use SurveyMonkey, and the company recently went public, further enhancing the stability and predictability of the tool---especially for users who use SurveyMonkey as an integrated part of … Continue reading SurveyMonkey is Great, But Not for Startups
When I first started PeopleFish in 2016, I called everyone I knew to sell our survey research tools. Almost no one had work for me. I remember one visit to a friend’s company. I presented my concept, but got just one sentence in response: “Sorry, we just don’t do surveys.” Survey market research just wasn’t … Continue reading Survey Research is Changing. Here’s how.
There's a million ways a survey project can go wrong. We see it happen all too often. An energetic startup founder designs a survey he thinks will change the way he does business---turning his "gut instinct" into validated, data-driven insights about his customers. But the data comes back, after weeks of work, and it's anything … Continue reading Some Best Practices for Market Research Surveys
You’ve fielded a market research survey. For weeks, you wrote and rewrote your survey questions. You paid for a SurveyMonkey license and spent hours learning how to program your survey. You leveraged dozens of industry connections to get survey answers — a hard-earned set of 300 respondents. Getting here wasn’t easy. But unfortunately, you’re not done. Before … Continue reading How to Clean Your Market Research Survey Data
"Don't go to market before doing market research.” Aspiring entrepreneurs hear that all the time. But what does this actually mean? Does every startup do market research? Is market research realistic for a startup with a small budget, little-to-no marketing team, and no product prototypes? Here’s our Founder's outline for startup market research projects, based … Continue reading What Does Startup Market Research Actually Look Like?
Screener questions are the gate-keepers of your market research surveys. They sit at the beginning of your survey instrument, and they disqualify anyone who you don't want to hear from. Poorly-designed screener questions will undermine the entire purpose of your survey project. They will let the wrong people into your survey, diminishing the accuracy of … Continue reading Rule #1 When Writing Screener Questions for Your Survey