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Aug
23

Sifting your User Research

  • Posted By : Jennifer Bennett/
  • 0 comments /
  • Under : App Advice, Business, Coding

So last we left you we were meeting with every meetup or conference organizer in the Metro-Nashville area. And then I emailed some in San Francisco for good measure.

When we’d meet, I had a giant list of questions that I’d generally attempt to cover during our chat. If we veered off into an uncharted area, no problem, but I typically tried to cover some of the same topics with each and every person I spoke with so that later I could compare and contrast responses. After each meeting, I’d “brain dump” everything we talked about into a text document. At the end of this I had over 20 pages of “notes” from organizers here in Nashville.

Welcome to Jennifer’s crash course in user research….

  • Did everyone say the same thing? Nope.
  • Did everyone have exactly the same issues? Nope.
  • Did you really expect every single person, to have the exact same needs? Well, no…but that would definitely have made this easier.

So how do I take all of this broad feedback and use it to come up with meaningful answers?

First I looked for trends…
  • What is something I heard from more than 3 or 4 people? Something that kept coming up without my asking or prompting?
  • What was the response when broadly outlining my idea? Tepid, interested?  People will rarely, if ever, ACTUALLY tell you they don’t like your idea. They’ll just…kind of nod and make noncommittal statements about the idea instead of discussing how they, themselves would use it.

Now what are the trends amongst the people who offered similar suggestions or had similar responses?

  • Is it one specific kind of person or kind of meetup/conference?
  • Are issues noticeably split amongst different groups?
  • Are these suggestions/trends actionable, solveable, and from large enough demographics?

I discovered that those who, in a previous life, held a job that required them to be more social didn’t have as hard of a time going out there, hitting the pavement, and offering the right information to potential sponsors. I also noticed that organizers who had been doing this for a while succeeded through trial and error, or through helping with other local efforts like tech conferences where more experienced people gave advice.

All of a sudden our market for organizers who needed help with how to ask for sponsorship was smaller. It was looking like just newbies and those whose core competency was more solely focused on code versus people .

But, I DID have one piece of feedback that came up over and over from this more experienced group – “Once we’ve used up our personal connections, we don’t know who specifically to ask to grow our sponsorship” …not what to ask, or how to ask but WHO.

This was different from our initial assumption. (And why you do this process to begin with).  And this isn’t feedback that we can easily solve with a simple solution. Which makes sense—usually the hardest problems are the most prickly. After some internal discussion we did determine that there were a few potential ways to tackle the “who to talk to” problem but none of them are super easy.

So now what?

We have to ask ourselves, can our potential product not only provide help to those with the “how to ask” problem (early stage meetup organizers), but begin to seed data and insights for those organizer-pros who have trouble with the “who to ask” part (veteran meetup organizers and larger conferences).  Will our actual “value” be on the back end of the product and not where we initially thought?

In assessing your own user research ask yourself:

  • Are there still problems I can solve?
  • Can we still reach users with these pain points?
  • Is this still profitable? (Are there enough users with this pain point, is the solution reasonable to build, and will those users pay for it?)

 

For us, it’s time to go back to the business model and adjust our numbers. If not as many people are within our initial demo or willing to pay for the proposal product, can we get enough users in there to build data for a sponsorship leads product which seems more valuable to experienced organizers?

 

Next steps?  We’ll attempt to broadly scope and estimate features for supporting the two types of users in order the reach profitability instead of just one. We’ll need to talk with organizers again now that we have firmer features in mind. And we should put some infrastructure out there to test the interest beyond Nashville (Product Hunt, Beta List, etc).

 

 


Aug
06

Testing the Waters – A New Product Idea

  • Posted By : Jennifer Bennett/
  • 0 comments /
  • Under : Coding

So you know how we were trying to “magic” an amazing idea last month? We made lists. We read books. We drew on the white board a lot. We looked at everything from Product Hunt, Beta List, and YCombinator. I even scrolled way back in the @BoredElonMusk Twitter handle (There are some great product ideas in there…that we’re not interested in building).

Well after weeks of being super negative about everything and thinking that we were never going to find anything good, we went on vacation to NYC. Then I went on a walk to lunch – gotta get my Turnip Truck Hot Bar fix – and I had an idea….

We host Nashville Cocoaheads. They have their meetings at our office. Sometimes we buy pizza or beer for them. One of their challenges has been finding sponsors. Mostly because they’re busy with their day jobs, not to mention sourcing the actual speaker part of the events. And this isn’t the only group. We’ve also had emails from friends who needed money for chairs for their usergroup. Like, a lot of chairs. Their event is super successful, hundreds of attendees successful, but we still ended up sitting on the floor one time. (We did give money for chairs the time we were asked and now they have amazing venue sponsors who have their own chairs).

This sucks.

My friends are trying to create wonderful things for their peers and shouldn’t be worrying about these small things. We’re sitting on the floor. Or drinking water instead of beer. Or rushing from the meetup to dinner because the organizer only bought 2 pizzas instead of 6 because they were paying for it out of pocket and now it’s 8pm and I’m super hongry.

Now I know the point of usergroups is not pizza…or chairs. But these things help. You’re tired at the end of the day, and you’re taking that little bit of energy left to go to a thing and learn something new. It would be nice if there was sustenance there, or even better…free tickets to a conference or a free pass to a new software tool. Congratulations on doing something extra – here’s another piece of help.

So, I got to thinking…wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a tool to help my friends find sponsors for their usergroups quickly and easily? They wouldn’t have to cold email. They wouldn’t have to figure out how to make a pdf with their sponsorship packages when what they care about most is being a really good software developer. They wouldn’t have to buy the pizza themselves or email their friends for help (even though we like to help).

But wait….

is this a real problem? Or are my friends just bad at organizing meetups?

So I sent quick emails to friends who are organizers along the lines of “What do you think about a sponsorship tool for usergroups…” I got responses back that were practically epistolary novels about how YES. YES WE WANT THIS. OH GOD. YES. and then 1,000 ideas of what it could look like.

Well then….let’s proceed.

So I wrote some more emails… a ton of emails actually. And I had coffee, and beers, and Slack convos.  And… it seems like a problem a lot of organizers have. Maybe not always on the same dire level but it’s still a task no one likes but everyone needs.

Sidebar: I LOVE OUR LOCAL TECH SCENE and how amazingly patient and helpful all of the Nashville organizers and sponsors are. You guys make me want to build this thing immediately, if only to give back to those who have already given Nashville so much. 

Currently, I’m still in the process of having meetings with the Sponsor side of the equation but I’m looking forward to it.

I think we might have found a winner you guys. We’re passionate about our local tech community (and other ones like it), this is something within our grasp to build (sorry, massive email sentiment analysis idea), and maybe just maybe it can be profitable (sponsorship help for podcasts, for school clubs, for little league teams, for any grassroots organizer of anything).

Next up. More meetings. Competitive Research. TAM and monetization. What does this idea look like in feature form? We’ll keep you posted.


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