Ask HN: Best ways to learn what users want?
I think understand "build" part of "build something people want" relatively well, but I don't have the second part figured out. In my particular case, my friend and I launched an online deal aggregator/notifier on the Android market a couple days ago. We built it to scratch our own itch but also as an exercise in creating a desirable product. We have 100-500 downloads, but no one has commented or rated the app in the market, or contacted us through our support blog.
I've tried surveys and direct emails in past projects and found that people often gave conflicting feature requests and the responses were difficult to make sense of. I've also found Steve Blank's customer development helpful as a framework, but what's the best way to apply that to non-enterprise projects?
Thanks!
John Mullins describes a lightweight technique called the "long interview" in The New Business Road Test. I've only used this seriously once. The results of my trial provided good insights but were not as definite as I'd hoped.
Another method I heard from a startup marketing guru is that if you have a large number of users running a free or pre-release version, you should ask them, "how disappointed would you be if this product were discontinued?" You have product-market fit when a significant portion answer that they would be "very disappointed."
I've also had the impression that feature requests are not a particularly useful metric by themselves. The fact that you have conflicting feature requests probably indicates that your market is highly subsegmented. It might be useful to try to map these subsegments demographically and need-wise.
This is the site: http://dealdealdeal.net/
And this is the HN submission for feedback: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1713519
How are you monetizing the app? Do you have a way of seeing how much people are actually using it after downloading?