It’s a good idea to do some market research and “survey the land” before you jump into a new venture.

It doesn’t have to be anything “hi tech”.

Sometimes sending a survey to some friends and family members should be enough to get the research going.

After all if you can’t start with family and friends, who should you start with?

People who already know you will be willing to give you the time of day, while total strangers will have no problem with “blowing you off”.

Before we go into any possible issues that might arise, we should first ask ourselves the pivotal question...

Can we indeed use surveys to explore and develop ideas before you launch into a new business?

YES!

But make sure you are taking polls from the right segment of people to begin with. You have to be sure that the information or data set you get is from the right “pool” of people.

If you’re getting information from a population segment that doesn’t have the problem, or understand the problem that you are trying to solve, then you are going to get either useless information, or information that might poison the design of your product or service.

Once a friend reached out to me for advice on an app. He is in the fashion business and he has this idea that men would be comfortable buying ready made wear via an app.

So what he wanted from me was tips around style selection as well as some talking points around the app itself.

It’s understandable for someone who’s a fashion entrepreneur to reach out to friends, family and associates when beginning the enterprise, but there are a few things we ought to note here.

I know nothing about clothes and fashion!

I don’t pay for tailoring services via an app!

I don’t buy ready made clothing off any website (yes I know that my wife and other women do!)

Also I am “tech averse” and only use the apps that I’ve been forced to use such as my banking apps, email apps, podcast recording app, and other apps like Instagram that I use for business purposes.

If you use surveys and opinions polls from people like me in this context, you will make bad clothes, and you’ll make an app with poor design, usability and user/ customer experience.

If you are going to send the survey to people you know, how about a few pre qualifying questions before you send it out?

“Hey bro (sis, auntie, dear friend, valued customer) I’d like to pick your brain about something, do you like to baff up?”

“How do you decide which clothes to wear?”

“How do you make styling choices?”

“Is fashion important to you?”

Positive answers to questions like this means it’s a good idea to go ahead and send the whole survey to them.

Negative, uninterested, or lackluster answers will mean that this is a bad candidate to send this survey to.

If you don’t do this, your friend or family member will wake up one day with an email link for a survey.... and they’ll just ignore it.

The goal isn’t to send this survey for people to just ignore. Yes you aren’t spending much money or time to send these things out, but there’s valuable data that we’re hoping to get back from this activity.

People are not in the habit of responding to surveys without any prior context.

The prior context isn’t just that they know you, but that they’re also interested in the subject, have some knowledge or opinions about it, and possibly that they are expecting you to send the survey.

At the very least give them some reasons in the email or the survey as to WHY you have chosen to send it to them.

If you are going to use my suggestion of “pre qualifying” people before sending out the survey, then ask them a few questions via chat or SMS before hand.

The answers to these questions will help you decide 1. If they are the right person to talk to and 2. It will provide a relevant context beforehand so that they are expecting the survey, and increase their likelihood of responding.

If you follow these kinds of suggestions then you should have the right information you need to move ahead.

So think smart before you send out your surveys and opinion polls.

Would you rather send out 1,000 emails and have 5 people respond? Or you put in the work and send out 100 emails and only 40 people respond?

Which exercise do you think will give you more useful data?