by Cap’n Rich of Beth Ann Charters
This is a part of a series of posts written by entrepreneurs of the Spring 2021 Business Accelerator cohort for EforAll Cape Cod.
I solemnly swear to never, ever again make fun of the number of e-mails Amanda sends out every week, as the one I received this morning saved my bacon — I totally forgot about this blog.
Some forty years ago I had put together a survey in one of my political science undergrad courses, no clue now as to what it was about, but I suspected the intent then and the intent in this class would be pretty much the same — formulate non-biased questions about a specific topic (candidate/product/ service) to a large, demographically varied population and, by applying various statistical calculations, draw certain data backed conclusions to use (political campaigns/marketing). For all intents and purposes, it was, but their were a few differences as well as new, interesting points.
The first of these was discovering what the number one reason was that start-up companies fail. The answer — there was no market need for the product/service. This honestly surprised me, as really, wouldn’t anyone with half a brain figure out somehow/someway if there was a market for their product/service before they invested one penny? Selling ice in Alaska — duh! But I guess the vividness of this puts the point across, ask questions! Maybe in a lot of cases you don’t have to determine the need, maybe you do, but surely you need to determine other things, price for example, and one of the best ways to do this is to ask — hence surveys.
I think the class also presented a good understanding of the value proposition testing funnel, but I really think the class did a great job on the nuts and bolts of the actual survey questions. No yes/no questions, examples of qualitative questions, and a mix of scale, preference, as well as open ended questions. One big point was to not come across as selling your business/product, the questions should be generic enough to apply to your business/product, but not specific enough for the responders to think they are rating your business/ product.
One point I did take exception to — the presentation said to ask 30–50 respondents from your ideal target market to achieve statistical significance. Personal opinion is the more the better, and my “gut” feel is over 100 at a minimum. Maybe I should take a survey of survey firms to ask them their opinions, as “gut” feels are not good enough when investing money and blood, sweat, and tears in your new endeavor!
