Nivi · September 29th, 2009
Almost every startup with an unfinished application puts up a page like this:
The customer development team at Grockit (Sean Ellis and Matt Johnson) takes a more interesting approach:
Most startups just gather a list of email addresses. But Grockit measures the customer’s intent: “Why do you want to use our product?”
Consider asking these additional questions, perhaps on a second page:
- “Can our CEO contact you to learn more about your needs?” Now you’ve got a list of earlyvangelists you can talk to — an awesome asset for startups that are iterating with their customers to reach product/market fit.
- “How are you preparing for the LSAT today?” Now you know if customers are putting together a solution out of other parts.
- “Would you pay for Grockit if it met your needs?” Now you know if customers have a budget.
This is a customer development pattern that other startups should copy.
# And here’s Steve Blank‘s definition of an earlyvangelist — memorize it now.
Topics Customer Development
I had a small rant on this topic a while back, http://davestone.posterous.com/statistically-registering-interest
You, and others, might also find interesting Josh Bokardo’s post on this: http://bokardo.com/archives/using-your-sign-up-form-as-a-qualifier/
He talks about startup Monotask, which has the standard enter-your-email-here form, but takes you to a brief survey after you’ve submitted it. To me, this seems like a great way to still get the extra feedback, without raising the barrier for a visitor to contribute their contact information.
I particularly like this post — I keep coming back to it for reference on a couple of projects that I’m involved in.
“Would you pay for Grockit if it met your needs?” — simple question, but very effective for high level segmentation of sign-ups.
For my latest project, PageDo — we’ve opted to use a simple MailChimp sign-up page rather than build our own. Using MailChimp, the sign-up form was online within 30 minutes, instead of a couple of hours if we built our own backend to capture the data.