4 ms·

I am reading thru this and it is a good, recommended read however I am getting slightly annoyed with academic attitude of the author. Like batman in the cartoon

by chvid 12y ago

I am reading thru this and it is a good, recommended read however I am getting slightly annoyed with academic attitude of the author. Like batman in the cartoon I want to slap him but not for "sloppy market research". But for using the term "market research" at all. (This is essientially the first and maybe the second point reiterated.) Suppose you were a cook with your own restaurant. How do you figure out what works and what doesn't? Do you go and do market research, have questionaries, focus groups, do statistics, user-driven cooking or whatever? Surely not. You create dishes, put the new ones in the menu as today's special. Then you figure out whether people like them or not. How do you figure that out? Do you ask them? Of course you don't because you know that if you ask "did you enjoy your dinner?" People will just be polite and tell you "yes - it was excellent - thank you very much". No. You look at whether they finished their plates or send it back half-full. Whether you get any sales. Whether they come back for more. Even my mother knows this. When she cooks cookies, she doesn't ask me "do you like them?" Because she knows I will just say "yes - they are the best cookies in the world, mum". She asks me if I want another. And if I stay the night, she looks at whether I get up at 3 am to roam the kitchen for more of them cookies. This is basic human behaviour but somehow lost in the academics of business administration. The second thing is that I get the feeling that the author simply haven't explored the huge "product space" between takeaway and ready-to-cook prepackaged ingredients with a recipe at all. How about - this is essientially takeway but you have to heat the curry in your microwave and then add the fresh coriander yourself - the upshot is that it will last a week in your fridge should you not eat it all tonight. Or maybe: It is protein shakes and vitamin pills for a week - no problem - it stays "fresh" for 5 years. Or: It is the latest Jamie Oliver book with ingredients to get you started on the first three dishes.

chvid 12y ago
Oh - I forgot the must basic thing that both my mum and the cook does: Tasting and eating their own stuff.
jjoonathan 12y ago
How are the strategies you listed not market research?
- amscanne 12y ago
  It is market research, just not named as such. I think OP was simply complaining that the article author approached market research academically, throwing common sense out of the window in the process. Classic outsmarting yourself. You don't need to call it market research for it to be effective (the chef probably doesn't).
  - theworst 12y ago
    Suppose I got into doing those things, yet I am aware of the "startup" terms for them. Should I consciously avoid using the jargon (which is really a shortcut way of expressing a longer idea to a familiar audience)? No, rather than giving you a long winded discussion of the steps to getting dressed (or whatever the jargon may be), I'll just say, "I got dressed". It conveys more information in a shorter frame. Why would someone avoid being compact and expressive to a niche audience?
    - amscanne 12y ago
      I don't understand your getting dressed example. That seems to be cutting to the heart of what actually was done. That's the opposite of jargon. The problem with jargon is that while it can express abstract purpose or intent (that can otherwise difficult to describe), it's basically meaningless in describing actual actions. For example, you could say "I was doing market research today." But wtf does that really mean? It sounds smart and like you know what you're doing, but ultimately it's more meaningful to say "I was reading our competitor's website" or "I was asking people on the street if they would buy our product." Jargon has it's place, but just because you call talking to your friends about your idea "market research" doesn't make it any more useful. I think it's easy to fall into that trap.
      - theworst 12y ago
        Clothing was def a bad analogy, given my fashion sense (or at least that's what my ex-partner says!) My point was that jargon has it's place as a shortcut to language. Sure, people use it to sound smart. But it's also a short cut. Back to the original point, doing "market research" could be very meaningful to people I report to in the context of my job. They don't care what the steps were, exactly, just that I was doing my duty diligence and figuring out what the hell we should sell to whom. Based on your last graph, I think I agree more than disagree. But I've had very dense, yet brief, conversations with other technical people that could only be brief due to jargon. And non-technical people thought we were b.s.ing each other because they didn't understand the terminology. But you are definitely correct -- if you want the greatest reward-to-time ratio when learning a field, just learn the jargon first. In fact, even if you want depth of understanding, learn the jargon first. 1) you'll then know what other people are talking about, and 2) you'll be "part of the tribe", and more trusted. YMMV. For me, learning the language of a culture is just step 1 to communicating with them.
arghbleargh 12y ago
Moreover, you don't even need to get to the "testing" step in a lot of cases. Are people going to like your spicy anchovy and cottage cheese pizza topped with ice cream? Answer: no. I didn't have to interact with a single customer to know that. Other ideas are not so obviously bad, but I feel like a lot of these failed startups would not have existed in the first place if the founders had been really honest with themselves. If you don't have a reasonably strong belief that your idea is going to work, why bother testing it at all? At the least, you should probably try it on a tiny scale first (i.e. on yourself or a few friends) before taking investments, hiring employees, etc.
- theworst 12y ago
  All of your comment seems to have been covered by the author's article. Sometimes you get positive feedback at a small scale that doesn't work in a larger sense. That was kinda one of the major points in the article.
notastartup 12y ago
You summed up lean learning methodology very well with the restaurant analogy. You are absolutely right you can't just ask people, 'hey how are we doing', you study the result.
DodgyEggplant 12y ago
This analogy completely misses the huge chasm between a physical outlet where you can actually look at people, talk to them and watch their actual behaviour, vs. a web property (usability tests help to close the gap)
noelwelsh 12y ago
In your restaurant and cookie example you have a well defined market. If you're a restaurant you are really a Chinese restaurant, or a Mexican restaurant, or whatever. You have defined your market by type of food and price point. In a startup all these things are up for grabs. You have much more freedom to experiment, but it is orders of magnitude more expensive to test business models then it is to test cookie recipes. One of these takes months or even years to validate, and one of these takes less than an hour. "The second thing is that I get the feeling that the author simply haven't explored the huge "product space" between takeaway and ready-to-cook prepackaged ingredients with a recipe at all." This is very true, but that ties into my point: it's much much harder to do this testing than to test a new recipe. Hence many people try to find a cheaper way to validate ideas, which is what market research is all about. Now whether the OP did market research well is a different matter. In fact he's quite up-front he didn't. But that doesn't mean well conducted market research in not worthwhile.
davemel37 12y ago
Despite this being common sense...I still find businesses asking me where I heard about them. This is notoriously inaccurate, yet it is relied upon by so many businesses. The best way to track how customers found you when they call is to use different phone numbers in your marketing. Even in web forms, asking where you heard about me...I bet 50% of your responses are the first choice in the drop down menu. Customers Lie. Not maliciously...but you can't expect them to understand and respect the importance accurate tracking on your side of the fence is.
theworst 12y ago
How would you recommend doing this if you are just working to set up your kitchen, and to perfect your recipes? What if you are just learning to cook, and don't have the resources to setup a full kitchen? A startup is not a 'real' company, writ small. There are tricks to emulate the necessary feedback mechanisms, but your analogy is more appropriate to an operating company.
jordanbrown 12y ago
No joke, had someone on my team during startup weekend this weekend that could not let go of market research. It pretty much ruined the mural of the whole team.
- checker659 12y ago
  What were you guys painting anyways? \s
  - jordanbrown 12y ago
    haha it was my first and last time I attend one of those things.
tim333 12y ago
It seems to me the best market research is to try your idea with a minimum viable product. In the Dinnr case that I think would be somethig like a website saying "fancy this for dinner we'll deliver it for £25, phone this number", made with some free website builder (wix etc), the bloke with his bike ready to answer the phone, pop to Sainsbury's and deliver stuff, and promotion by mailing their mates on facebook, twitter and the like. Total cost ~0 apart from some time. For feedback they could have phoned any customers a few days later to ask if they liked it. This may have been a better way to start than raising £60k via Seedrs (https://www.seedrs.com/post_investment/9369/round_details/1960 https://www.seedrs.com/post_investment/9369/round_details/19...) and spending "9 hours a day, 6 days a week, sitting in a cold warehouse in West Acton" perhaps.
rainmaking 12y ago
I'm half American but have grown up and have been living in German speaking cultures all my life. I have found that people here simply respond well to a little bit of formal language, so it's not surprising the author would habitually use it. People tend to take it as an implicit promise that you know what you're doing. You can usually get away with a little semantic trickery though; of course we do market research, we're a serious business after all. It's just that in the startup context, the best way of doing this is trying stuff and actually observing behavior. When called on the bluff, invent a qualifier: Oh of course market research works differently in the startup context; we call it "highly iterative" market research. (Schnelliterationsmarktforschung).

by chvid 12y ago

chvid 12y ago

Oh - I forgot the must basic thing that both my mum and the cook does: Tasting and eating their own stuff.

jjoonathan 12y ago

How are the strategies you listed not market research?

amscanne 12y ago
It is market research, just not named as such. I think OP was simply complaining that the article author approached market research academically, throwing common sense out of the window in the process. Classic outsmarting yourself. You don't need to call it market research for it to be effective (the chef probably doesn't).
- theworst 12y ago
  Suppose I got into doing those things, yet I am aware of the "startup" terms for them. Should I consciously avoid using the jargon (which is really a shortcut way of expressing a longer idea to a familiar audience)? No, rather than giving you a long winded discussion of the steps to getting dressed (or whatever the jargon may be), I'll just say, "I got dressed". It conveys more information in a shorter frame. Why would someone avoid being compact and expressive to a niche audience?
  - amscanne 12y ago
    I don't understand your getting dressed example. That seems to be cutting to the heart of what actually was done. That's the opposite of jargon. The problem with jargon is that while it can express abstract purpose or intent (that can otherwise difficult to describe), it's basically meaningless in describing actual actions. For example, you could say "I was doing market research today." But wtf does that really mean? It sounds smart and like you know what you're doing, but ultimately it's more meaningful to say "I was reading our competitor's website" or "I was asking people on the street if they would buy our product." Jargon has it's place, but just because you call talking to your friends about your idea "market research" doesn't make it any more useful. I think it's easy to fall into that trap.
    - theworst 12y ago
      Clothing was def a bad analogy, given my fashion sense (or at least that's what my ex-partner says!) My point was that jargon has it's place as a shortcut to language. Sure, people use it to sound smart. But it's also a short cut. Back to the original point, doing "market research" could be very meaningful to people I report to in the context of my job. They don't care what the steps were, exactly, just that I was doing my duty diligence and figuring out what the hell we should sell to whom. Based on your last graph, I think I agree more than disagree. But I've had very dense, yet brief, conversations with other technical people that could only be brief due to jargon. And non-technical people thought we were b.s.ing each other because they didn't understand the terminology. But you are definitely correct -- if you want the greatest reward-to-time ratio when learning a field, just learn the jargon first. In fact, even if you want depth of understanding, learn the jargon first. 1) you'll then know what other people are talking about, and 2) you'll be "part of the tribe", and more trusted. YMMV. For me, learning the language of a culture is just step 1 to communicating with them.

arghbleargh 12y ago

Moreover, you don't even need to get to the "testing" step in a lot of cases. Are people going to like your spicy anchovy and cottage cheese pizza topped with ice cream? Answer: no. I didn't have to interact with a single customer to know that. Other ideas are not so obviously bad, but I feel like a lot of these failed startups would not have existed in the first place if the founders had been really honest with themselves. If you don't have a reasonably strong belief that your idea is going to work, why bother testing it at all? At the least, you should probably try it on a tiny scale first (i.e. on yourself or a few friends) before taking investments, hiring employees, etc.

theworst 12y ago
All of your comment seems to have been covered by the author's article. Sometimes you get positive feedback at a small scale that doesn't work in a larger sense. That was kinda one of the major points in the article.

notastartup 12y ago

You summed up lean learning methodology very well with the restaurant analogy. You are absolutely right you can't just ask people, 'hey how are we doing', you study the result.

DodgyEggplant 12y ago

This analogy completely misses the huge chasm between a physical outlet where you can actually look at people, talk to them and watch their actual behaviour, vs. a web property (usability tests help to close the gap)

noelwelsh 12y ago

In your restaurant and cookie example you have a well defined market. If you're a restaurant you are really a Chinese restaurant, or a Mexican restaurant, or whatever. You have defined your market by type of food and price point. In a startup all these things are up for grabs. You have much more freedom to experiment, but it is orders of magnitude more expensive to test business models then it is to test cookie recipes. One of these takes months or even years to validate, and one of these takes less than an hour. "The second thing is that I get the feeling that the author simply haven't explored the huge "product space" between takeaway and ready-to-cook prepackaged ingredients with a recipe at all." This is very true, but that ties into my point: it's much much harder to do this testing than to test a new recipe. Hence many people try to find a cheaper way to validate ideas, which is what market research is all about. Now whether the OP did market research well is a different matter. In fact he's quite up-front he didn't. But that doesn't mean well conducted market research in not worthwhile.

davemel37 12y ago

Despite this being common sense...I still find businesses asking me where I heard about them. This is notoriously inaccurate, yet it is relied upon by so many businesses. The best way to track how customers found you when they call is to use different phone numbers in your marketing. Even in web forms, asking where you heard about me...I bet 50% of your responses are the first choice in the drop down menu. Customers Lie. Not maliciously...but you can't expect them to understand and respect the importance accurate tracking on your side of the fence is.

theworst 12y ago

How would you recommend doing this if you are just working to set up your kitchen, and to perfect your recipes? What if you are just learning to cook, and don't have the resources to setup a full kitchen? A startup is not a 'real' company, writ small. There are tricks to emulate the necessary feedback mechanisms, but your analogy is more appropriate to an operating company.

jordanbrown 12y ago

No joke, had someone on my team during startup weekend this weekend that could not let go of market research. It pretty much ruined the mural of the whole team.

checker659 12y ago
What were you guys painting anyways? \s
- jordanbrown 12y ago
  haha it was my first and last time I attend one of those things.

tim333 12y ago

It seems to me the best market research is to try your idea with a minimum viable product. In the Dinnr case that I think would be somethig like a website saying "fancy this for dinner we'll deliver it for £25, phone this number", made with some free website builder (wix etc), the bloke with his bike ready to answer the phone, pop to Sainsbury's and deliver stuff, and promotion by mailing their mates on facebook, twitter and the like. Total cost ~0 apart from some time. For feedback they could have phoned any customers a few days later to ask if they liked it. This may have been a better way to start than raising £60k via Seedrs (https://www.seedrs.com/post_investment/9369/round_details/1960 https://www.seedrs.com/post_investment/9369/round_details/19...) and spending "9 hours a day, 6 days a week, sitting in a cold warehouse in West Acton" perhaps.

rainmaking 12y ago

I'm half American but have grown up and have been living in German speaking cultures all my life. I have found that people here simply respond well to a little bit of formal language, so it's not surprising the author would habitually use it. People tend to take it as an implicit promise that you know what you're doing. You can usually get away with a little semantic trickery though; of course we do market research, we're a serious business after all. It's just that in the startup context, the best way of doing this is trying stuff and actually observing behavior. When called on the bluff, invent a qualifier: Oh of course market research works differently in the startup context; we call it "highly iterative" market research. (Schnelliterationsmarktforschung).