Your Friends and Family Lie – Redo Your Statistics
January 3, 2008 by Jim Gordon
Filed under Business
Have you ever asked a group of friends and family if they liked one of your ideas? Have you ever personally given them one of your products and asked “Hey, this is good, right?” How many of them said “no”? According to this article on CNN (taken from Fortune), a venture capitalist threw the idea back into the creator’s face.
Hi, I created and just launched TripnTale.com, a social networking website for traveling. I’m one month away from the public launch and so far I’m only inviting friends and relatives. I’ve talked to several VCs and they don’t think my site will take off, although the feedback from all users is very positive. Should I listen to the VCs or the people who are already using my site?
How did this happen? After reading this, I immediately threw down the red flag – the statistics are useless! He is dealing with people who care about his feelings.
Also, asking for general feedback will typically result in vague responses. If you want to get real feedback, ask total strangers questions like “Did you have any issues updating your profile?” “Is there any way updating your profile could be made easier?” “What do you want to see when you first login?” You see where I’m going with this. Another problem is asking with enthusiasm. If you sarcastically ask your friends and relatives: Hey, how dumb is this… some guy wants to create a ridiculous travel social networking site – what’s wrong with the other networking sites? Doesn’t that seem useless? Do you think you would get some negative feedback? I do.
So as a message to the guy who got turned down by the VC: Let the venture capitalist be your first real statistic. Asking your friends and relatives is good to a certain point, but it won’t give you the reliable statistics needed to measure your idea as a hit or miss.
I agree!
Best thing to do is: ask your enemies… they’ll be straight to the bone :-)
Great advice! There is always a fine line between honesty and hurting the feelings of a friend or relative. I try to keep in mind the idea of constructive criticism but the reality is the desire to maintain a relationship usually wins out over harsh critic.
Hi everybody,
Thanks for the advice. I did try to get as much negative feedbacks as possible during the inception of the idea of travel social networking site. Some negative feedbacks that I receive are due to the fact that they already have Flickr to upload photos, so they don’t want to have another photo sharing site. The fact is, tripntale.com is supposed to be more than just photo sharing site, it’s for everyone who treasures their travel memories. Everytime you’re back from your trip, you have tons of photos, and not to mention memories where you should put in a journal if you don’t want it to be lost a few weeks later. Many people do want to “collect” their travel as their achievements.
And when I was saying active users are loving my site, I’m not kidding, these are some of the people that gave me negative feedback saying they don’t want that kind of site. Now they’re thanking me because their travel memories are all in one place.
So my point to all of these is that I truly believe in what I’m doing, and I can assure you that I’ve tried to gather as much negative feedbacks as possible, but at the end of the day, I still believe in producing something first and let those critics judge it.
And Jim, Simone, and Ali, I really encourage you guys to join the site or at least use some of the features available just for the registered users and please let me know what I can improve.
I wasn’t discounting your idea at all. I was just using it as an example. I didn’t even check the site out, but was merely using it as an example to make a bigger point.
I appreciate you commenting, though – entrepreneurs making human interaction is vital to the success of their startups. Best of luck to you and your site, Darwin!
Thank you Jim for your best wishes. I have to say I love your blog. subscribed!
Thank you very much!