One of my favorites, Kickstarter, is mentioned.

(Source: boardofinnovation.com)

I really believe any team developing a product should be talking with potential costumers from day one. Being a technical person, it’s really easy to hide behind the code and make all the decisions from my guts. But you end up playing roulette at the product launch: either you have a stroke of luck and nailed exactly the critical need, or, more commonly, few people like it and no one loves it.

With Bundlr we’re forcing ourselves to speak to a couple of potential costumers each week. We have a list of people we want to talk to and try to reach two or three weekly. So far, it’s working great for several reasons:

Solves internal discussions

We’re a team of two and often have different opinions. How do we solve the arguments? We just think what would future users prefer. After chatting with a some it gets easier to personify the target costumers.

Prioritizes features

There are really a lot of features we would like to implement in Bundlr. Content aggregation comprises many interesting use cases. How do we decide what features to do first and what to leave out? We just ask target users which features would they pay for.

It’s still marketing

People you interview are more likely to engage with your product and tell others about it. You’re still marketing your product and it’s going to pay off in the end all the people you talked to.

Great for motivation

Finally, nothing motivates us more than having someone telling us how much they want what we’re building. And even when we don’t get it right, having a clear knowledge of the problem is essential to stay focused and motivated.

After reading this article on Hacker News I got curious about PickFu. It’s a service that allows you to ask a single A/B question to hundreds of persons, through Amazon Mechanical Turk.

It has several shortcomings though:

• The sample is skewed both geographically (USA/India) and in genre (more females)
• The sample is probably not related to your desired audience
• Your paying them, so expect more sympathetic answers
• Many answer as quickly as they can, without valuable feedback

Having that in mind, we decided to try it anyway. Since we launched an introduction page for Bundlr recently, we asked 50 persons whether they understood the information on the home page.

Overall, the results were 76% positive (sympathetic as I said :P). But the comments were the valuable result. Some examples of negative comments mentioning specific aspects we have to improve:

• Don’t know what a bundle is or where I would share a bundle.
• I have no idea what content curation is. Sounds like you are bundling something together.
• This is some complex stuff. I better description with illustrations is required for me.

And even the positive comments were insightful:

• It was very clear, I just question how it’s different from Stumble Upon etc
• I understood the concept and it was fine for “coming soon,” but some ideas on what the bundles could be used for or why the service exists would be nice.
• Sounds nice to have it all saved in one bundle instead of continuously doing one at a time.
• At least, I think I understand it. But what does a bundle look like? How is it ordered?

I won’t recommende acting soleny upon this kind of feedback, but it’s certainly interesting and gaves us a few toughts on how to better present our concept in the future. For only $5. We’ll probably use it again in following iterations.