A friend of mine just asked me for some advice on sending surveys. This is the list I came up with.

Sending surveys is an important part of early customer development; it helps you test a hypothesis and delivers you “perception” data. You can track how a user interacts with your service, it’s harder to track how they perceive it without surveys.

Early on in development of a consumer facing product, I’d recommend sending out simple surveys at short intervals (1-4 weeks) to a subset of your userbase. Below is the advice I gave my friend, if I’m missing anything, please leave it in the comments (Hattip to Hiten Shah, Leonard Speiser, and Sean Ellis who heavily influenced my thinking on this through tweets, posts, and conversations on this topic).

Hey,

First thing is too check out this: http://venturehacks.com/articles/measure-fit (not shocking that Venture Hacks has the go to resource, is it?)

Then check out the tool that video is about: www.survey.io

But here’s my advice:

- Order your survey intentionally. Use early questions as eventual filters. If your second question is “how bad would you feel if you couldn’t use this product” that helps you sort later questions (i.e. my power users think this is the key feature, everyone else thinks it’s something else).

- When evaluating the data, you don’t want to optimize for the largest segment, you want to optimize for the segment that’s most engaged.

- Don’t ask any questions without understanding how you’d apply the data you’re collecting.

- Ask some open ended questions. The open-ended everything survey recommended in the post is a great way to start. But I like to have less than half my questions require typing — and it’s usually just an “anything else you think we should know?”. You get much higher response rates. But, there’s definitely a time and a place: open-ended questions are really useful for messaging questions and for early “discovery” surveys. Those questions also allow you to learn a lot more about the user (and how committed they are — you can tell a lot from the length and quality of their response).

- Ask for the ability to followup by phone, and do phone followups with every person who says yes. You’ll learn a lot in that conversation — and you’ll develop deep relationships with potential customers.

- On the subejct of developing relationships, provide an option for opting-in to the “elites” club — let them self select into beta testing groups. These elites can often become marketing assets. Yelp did a great job of this. David Barrett at Expensify is also doing this well right now. Survey’s aren’t just data, build a marketing asset.

- Ask for their reactions to the product, optional and freeform (limit text length if you would like to use in materials or on twitter). Ask “can we use this for marketing purposes?”  Another idea: followup and get a small photo, name, link, etc. — use these assets to personalize the testimonials when you put them online.

- Don’t put explanatory text in front of questions. It’s tempting to try and put people in the right “frame” — it hurts you in the long run. Don’t alter the answers they want to give you.

- Short surveys win.  <10 questions. <5 mins to complete.  half that is much better. Don’t write an SAT test.

This is my 100th post on this blog.  While I’ve written several blogs over the last 5 years, I wasn’t smart enough to migrate posts over when I switch blogging platforms, so… I’m back at lucky number #100!

Humans like to evaluate at round numbers, we find milestones give good reminders to review behavior.  So, why do I blog?

Here are the 5 reasons I came up with:

1. Shaping my own thoughts – writing makes you clarify. Someone once said: “If you can’t write something, you don’t understand it.” Spot on.
2. Sharing ideas – I think often about topics outside of my expertise.  I share these thoughts because I probably won’t be able to follow them (focus is about saying no).  Also: you help me evolve the ideas, that which is deprived of sun does not grow.
3. Sharing best practices – I am helping establish the best practices of social marketing. I learn everyday from people who are kind enough to blog about the things they are knowledgeable about, I’d like to share my knowledge, like this and this.
4. Define myself – If you are meeting me, it will be helpful for you to know who I am, how I think, how I talk, what I like.  My twitter, tumblr and this blog give you a good idea.
5. Recognize amazing achievements, important thoughts, or other significant moments – The attention economy works because we like sharing significant ideas or moments with each other. We should all recognize when people make awesome things.

So, what will my 100th post be about?  Mostly #4 above this line, and #5 below this line.

I read “The five things I’d tell my entrepreneurial self” by Jon Bischke today.  Jon gives a 5 pieces of advice that are lessons best learned early, and one of them was so good I wanted to share it here:

Simply put, if you want to succeed, surround yourself with people who (a) are succeeding and (b) expect you to do likewise. That simple piece of advice will do more to put you on the path to success than anything else I can think of.

I couldn’t agree more, the people whom I choose to be friends with or work with are all great at what they do, quickly improving at it and expect the same from me.

I’m not an elitist on this — you don’t have to be impressive and driven for me to like you — but it’s easier to get value from high-octane people, so I try to encourage more of my interactions spent on high-octane people; it’s a primary reason I work at Involver.

There are probably a dozen people that actively help me improve by virtue of challenging me; without calling you all out individually — thank you!

We’re going through some hiring right now, and every time we do a round of hiring I learn something new. Acting as a hiring manager (especially if the hire will report to someone else) gives you a rare opportunity to view both sides of the problem (what am I looking for from the perfect candidate and what would make the perfect candidate excited about our company and our process). The first time you lead a serious hiring process, you learn a lot about yourself and the path your career is on — it represents the quickest accumulation of knowledge towards career development (in my humble opinion).  I’d love to write a lengthier post on what I’ve learned through hiring (I’ll add it to the list of topics), but today I’m in the thick of reviewing resumes and I’d rather share some tips on how to get past the first stage and how to communicate with hiring managers.

1. If the job listing gives a specific way to contact the company, follow it to a tee. The more specific the instructions, the more this applies. ~50% of applicants are “spray-and-pray” job hunting. I want to avoid hiring these people at all costs. This is as simple as throwing a very easier curveball into standard application procedure (my favorite is to ask for PDF attachement of resume and the cover letter printed in the body of the email with a specific subject line such as “EA Position Inquiry.” Miss any of those? You will not be getting an interview 99.999% of the time.
2. Always, Always go above and beyond if you think of a way to be helpful to the hiring manager. I had a candidate recently say “I know you requested a resume, and you may find it attached, however I’ve always found LinkedIn profiles to be easier to read than attached PDFs, so I’ve included that as well: www.linkedin.com/in/yadayadayada.” This let’s me know the person thinks beyond instructions (yet still follows directly laid out commands), and is capable of placing themselves in others shoes.
3. Don’t show off flowery writing. I’ver written published poetry, I have a love for witty turns-of-phrase, and I’ve read some beautifully written cover letters that I stopped reading halfway through. The world of business rewards clear, succinct communication. Save the pontification for your blog (why do you think I write this damn thing?)
4. The previous point is if you are a great writer. If you’re a mediocre writer DO NOT try to use large words or clever phrases to prove your intelligence. Be thankful that, in most cases, the business world only requires general clarity and not fanciful method. With all the time you’ve saved looking up words in the Thesaurus, go back and delete 30-70% of the words you wrote without altering the meaning.
5. Answer any questions clearly and upfront in the cover letter (eg “I know I’m over/under-qualified, but here’s why I am applying”).
6. List relevant skills/positions (no more than 2-3) in the cover letter.

There’s a pretty big kerfuffle going on about marketing guru Seth Godin’s recent launch of Squidoo brand communities.

Godin launched a service that aggregated the conversation occuring about companies in the social space and provided the brands a sidebar next to the content to address the various statements made.

Someone tweets badly about your brand? Just write next to the entry on squidoo that you’re working on the issue, or that this individual is a looney tune.

Pretty good idea, if you ignore that you are responding in a different medium than the complaint was filed in, on a site that has no third party validity, and that is an excercise in futility. But I will ignore that, primarily because Godin probably could have pulled it off and created a site third parties used to validate information.

Godin launched this program with a business model (companies pay $400 to own the sidebar next to all of this content and be able to respond to issues), and that was his fundamental problem. He realized the validity of his value prop and created the project, but missed the fact that we would view this fully baked idea as exploitation rather than participation in the community.

To see how Squidoo brand communities could have been a massive success, one just has to look at Get Satisfaction. Here’s the model:  1) find a massive need that consumers of companies have, 2) build an amazing application for it and get consumers to use and like the solution, and 3) charge companies for it.

Do all three, in order, and you are a hero of the next web, ushering in the future — skip number 2 and you are a brandjacker, preying on the fears that large companies have of not being able to control the conversation. Sad, but this is the case, even if you know what your business model is likely to be, it still pays to release your MVP early, for free, and get customers used to the service while learning from their interactions.

Godin should have published the brand communities feature with an ad-supported sidebard and then rolled out the solution for companies to buy that sidebar from advertisers. He would have had a much bigger winner on his hands had he done that.

Seth’s backed off, and that’s a bummer, because aggregating comments and sentiment about brands is a valuable service. I wish him the best of luck in continuing to innovate in this space and hope that through direct outreach he’s able to get many brands involved, because this service is only massively interesting if it can serve as the consumer’s one stop shop to get information about all brands it is thinking about doing business with.

MIT has conducted a recent study that seems to link socializing face to face with co-workers can lead to a 30% rise in worker productivity. This inherently makes sense, and I think it’s crucial to remember that as a manager, you want people to like each other, to spend time together, in or out of the office.

However, I bet there’s an interesting sub-study here about proximity of workspaces. When working on something soloitarily, I work significantly slower in office than I do from a coffee shop or from home. In the office, I’m interrupted frequently by questions about my tasks or announcements of good news — I’m literally never able to get into a flow state.

This is not to indict my co-workers, for I’m equally guilty of laying off personal thoughts onto co-worker’s conciousness. By asking someone about a task, I’ve reminded them and can remove that worry/thought from my mind.  It’s human nature to offload these responsibilities as much as possible.

It’s clear, however, that face to face communication is best for collaborating, and that socializing around breaks in focus points on work is beneficial to overall output. So working in physical isolation makes no sense.  My solution has been to work daily from the office, but to complete some work tasks in the morning or early evening from home, therfore working potentially fewer daily hours in office.

Every year I write a long email update to my friends, which you can sign up for on the far right hand side of this site. This year I’m also posting it on this blog as an experiment. The following is the full, unedited text of that email.

Happy New Years!  You are receiving this email from me because I want to keep you updated on what I’m up to. I send out between 1 and 4 emails like this a year (but always one on New Years Day) and focus on big updates and “best-of” tidbits to share.

If you’ve never received an update from me before, it means you signed up on my website for an update or that I added you to the list — you probably did something that was awesome enough for me to say, “Hey I should keep in touch with them.”  If you thought I was less awesome, or don’t want to receive these updates from me in the future, please accept my apology and unsubscribe (or reply to this message and let me know — I’ll unsubscribe you by hand).

I hope to summarize my year for you and then proffer a few lessons I’ve learned. Finally I’ll include a few links I feel are worth sharing. This is the longest message I’ve ever written, if you’ve only got the inclination to read one part, please skip to the end and read the segment titled Reflection and Projection – it’s the part I feel is most important and that I’m most proud of.

 

This message is broken into several parts and should take about 9 minutes to read all the way through. Each section can be read independently of the other sections and includes a title and estimated reading time at the beginning.

 

Summary of 2008  (estimated reading time: 3.5 Minutes)

I’ve always found the act of waiting for a specific day to look back and project forward a year a little ritualistic and weird, but it does create an interesting phenomenon — my friends seem to be singularly focused on reflection and projection and that makes it easier to see what friends, mentors and idols are doing. This is good because applying the lessons they’ve learned is a great way to improve.  And with tools like Twitter, Tumblr, Blogs, and Facebook, sharing those lessons is easier than ever – making massive emails like this valuable. I think in the next 5 years or so, I’ll be able to send yearly updates via a service that makes email less valuable.  I’ve started doing that already by posting this note on my blog (link)

2008 was a heck of a year, I struggle with picking the parts to summarize. I turned 22 this year, and, largely speaking, 2008 has been one dedicated to making Involver succeed.  For those of you that don’t know my company, we help marketers distribute and track video campaigns on social networks, like Facebook. The company is young, and it’s been a wild and fun ride watching it succeed.

With regards to that work, Involver has truly had a breakout year. At this time last year we were subleasing a small office in Palo Alto and were yet another unheard of startup, toiling in a popular and crowded industry.  In the first quarter of the New Year we established some great success with the Help Vinay campaign (which registered 26,000 South Asians for the bone marrow registry in 6 weeks) moved to a new office in the financial district of San Francisco and changed our name to Involver. Following that we launched our Pilot Program and started creating commercial campaigns. Now, brands that have used Involver’s platform include Puma, Chiquita Banana, Maker’s Mark, Reader’s Digest, Serena Software and Kiva.org. Not only that but our first commercial campaign won an OMMA, the industry leading award for Online Marketing, and our campaign for Kiva.org resulted in $300,000 for loans to entrepreneurs in the developing world.   This generated some amazing press for the company — we’ve been featured by countless bloggers and appeared in Inc., Wired and PBS — and Inc. Magazine named our co-founders two of the “Top 30 Entrepreneurs under 30 Years Old”.  And we moved, again, to bigger offices; we’re now in the SOMA district of San Francisco.  Just imagine what we’ll be able to do with a year of experience under our belts and you’ll see why I’m so excited about next year.  J

I’ve taken my work close to heart this year, but I still was able to take some time to have a personal life. In 2008, I moved apartments twice in an effort to experience more of this city and continually vary my experience (being open to randomness is a very effective way to grow quickly). I’m now in a beautiful place and have really enjoyed the live music, better access to transportation, and ample eateries in my new neighborhood.

I also launched a new personal website — http://www.tylerwillis.net — which chronicles my life and aggregates a lot of information about me. If you’re interested in more frequent updates on who I am and what I’m up to, that’s a great resource, and if you want the up to the minute updates, I post often to two services that allow for frequent but short updates, you can always visit my profiles on twitter or tumblr for that. 

I spent much of my remaining free time this year supporting Barack Obama by writing articles, donating, and hosting an event — my birthday party featured live music and raised several hundred dollars for the campaign — I believe he represents an amazing opportunity for American politics and I’m ecstatic that he’s our leader.  There is a movement growing in America, which is making politics attractive again to the best and brightest. Our political system will benefit from the economic collapse and a generational changing of the guard, and there is great opportunity to improve the system. I’ll be participating on a more local level in 2009 and implore you to do the same.

In the bucket that qualifies as both personal and work life, I made some strides as well. Early in the year I hosted a massively successful event, called Weekend Apps, which launched 11 new companies and brought together 100+ entrepreneurs to work together in new ways — around the same time, I shut down the consultancy I’d founded. Willis Media Group had a good roster of clients, but at the end of the day, I simply couldn’t get it to profitability. I learned a lot about struggle and the difficulties of service businesses, and even more about the value of limited liability — but life has trotted on nicely despite that failure.

Finally, I was also blessed with the opportunity to travel around the country a bit, in 2008 I visited New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, Kansas City, Salt Lake City, Black Rock City, and Vancouver. I took two road trips through the West and Pacific Northwest and was able to reflect on the joys of travel and it’s importance to maintaining a healthy mind. On these trips, I took up a copy of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” and yet again found inspiration there for my traveler’s soul.

I closed out the year in the most fantastic fashion, by doing an 18,000 foot skydive in Monterey Bay with very good friends who are all as excited about the future as I am. I was happy to be surrounded by them and their optimism, the same way I’m happy to be surrounded by you and your experience, intelligence and friendship heading into 2009.

 

Looking Ahead   (estimated reading time: 1.5 minutes)

2009 is poised to be a great year for Involver. The horrible financial crisis seems to be affecting almost every vertical in the industry except the ones we’ve focused on. I’ve heard that recessions don’t slow trends, they speed them up – and that would seem to be true. With advertising budgets dropping across the world, most agencies and companies are reporting increases in video and social media spend. We’re hiring and I think we’re well positioned to grow by helping more marketers run more effective and successful campaigns. The trends are on our side — and we’ve got more money and experience than we did at this time last year — I’m very excited for 2009!  I’ll also be hosting some events, the largest so far planned being SF Startup Weekend 2 in the spring.

2008 has also really excited me for the future on a larger scale than just work. Specifically when it comes to the possibilities of space.  Watching the Mars Phoenix mission (link) filled me with a sense of wonder and awe, and was a moment I felt truly engaged with what was unfolding. I was lucky enough to meet Peter Diamandis shortly afterwards and in a span of about 15 minutes, he convinced me that there was a tangible way to funnel that excitement into compelling action.

So, this year I joined the International Association of Space Entrepreneurs and started supporting the X Prize Foundation. In the next 12 months I plan on attending several space related conferences and events, read and write more about industry successes and failures, and explore ways to volunteer some time or resources to help groups at the cutting edge of commercializing space access. I can’t think of a more exciting way to spend my free time than supporting this burgeoning industry.

I’m also planning several trips.  In addition to work travel, I’d like to make it to either Dubai or India for a vacation and I will be returning to Black Rock City for the Burning Man festival in late 2009.

Reflection and Projection  (estimated reading time: 2 minutes)

It’s plain to see that I’m an optimist, sometimes more than is socially comfortable. The ease with which I dismiss the disastrous economic decline above serves as one example of that. I wrote that the recession will benefit our political system, and, before I cut this line, as having “rewarded our company for methodical execution and ruthless efficiency by removing competitors from the landscape.”  I make no mention of the disastrous effects on millions of people, and the great uncertainty that grips any well-briefed mind, because it truly doesn’t stand in the foreground of my mind (despite suffering personal loss of wealth).

Our species is running towards a precipice with looming dangers like economic decline, political unrest, climate crisis, and more threatening to grip us as we jump off the edge, but my optimism is stronger now than ever before. On the other side of that looming gap are extraordinary breakthroughs in healthcare, communications technology, access to space, human productivity, artistic creation and literally hundreds of fields. With the right execution and a little bit of luck we’ll all live to see these breakthroughs — and members of my generation will live to see dramatically lengthened life-spans, exploration and colonization of space, and more opportunity than ever to work for passion instead of simply working for pay.

Instead of taking this space to regale you with the many personal and focused changes I intend to make in 2009, let me rather encourage you to spend time this year thinking, as I’m going to, more about what we can do in 2009 to positively affect the future our culture will face in 2020, 2050, 3000 and beyond.

Support stabilization efforts in governmental structures, by joining the change congress movement or forming, researching, refining and voicing your opinions at Change.gov, the new open government system Obama’s administration is attempting to create. Volunteer for an organization that you think is going past triage, and actually doing something to solve a major problem systemically — do the triage also, but let’s work a little harder and make some headway on these problems.

These don’t have to be big efforts, but they should be continual and properly focused.  A group of us, doing small actions continually, will inspire larger groups and result in larger change.  There’s a trend of human’s banding together to build a better future that we can align with and help propel.  Remember Margaret Mead, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

I’m excited for 2009, and I look forward to sharing it with you.  I hope to build more frequency into this email list, and as such would love to hear about what you’d like to hear from me.  Please don’t hesitate to ever email me at tyler@tylerwillis.net

Happy New Year!

Tyler Harrison Willis

Things Worth Sharing           

·      http://bit.ly/KIrF  My friend Ramit is giving away $2500 to a young person with a concrete idea for social innovation. Deadline is Jan. 15th

·      http://bit.ly/2qXWUp  Malcolm Gladwell gave a great talk at The Moth, it’s a tall tale about his experience getting into Journalism.

·      http://bit.ly/ovOx   Explaining the political awakening of Generation X in the form of an apology to politically active Boomers for taking so long.

·      http://bit.ly/m1NC  A 4-minute-long video about wearable computers. Something I think will change personal interaction in the next 10-15 years.

·      http://bit.ly/17Rvn  The evolution of wearable, non-intrusive displays. Extremely important to improving the move towards wearable computing.

·      http://bit.ly/M0pD  A good mini video bio of my favorite modern poet, Rives, watch it, then watch this: http://bit.ly/2OiC8g

·      http://bit.ly/w24M  An elegant short story about the subject of death.

·      http://bit.ly/kCpq  Several very good remixes of Silversun Pickups songs.

·      http://bit.ly/11ML1  How to create the bullet-time effect from the matrix cost effectively.

Often I’ll find myself spending 20-60 minutes a day in a situation where I have some time to kill and my phone. Given the value I get from Twitter (breaking news and friend updates mixxed together) and the way I use twitter (not reading every tweet, just catching it when I can), I’ll often use this time to twitter.

Twitter is famous for cell phone use, but more for SMS – which is not my style; I use three tools: m.twitter.com, TwitterBerry, and my mobile browser. Given that m.twitter doesn’t record where you where in the updates, visiting links as they look interesting and then going back and finding your place can be a real hassle.  I create a twitter digest. I go through and make an email draft of links that look good, notes i want to keep, or ideas I have. Here’s an example of yesterday morning’s digest:

http://tinyurl.com/34bwp4

http://tinyurl.com/2qy4sz

http://tinyurl.com/2qr6a8

http://tinyurl.com/399qn9

http://twitter.com/confession

jowyang: Quotable looks about half accurate for this thread http://tinyurl.com/3yzcol 3 minutes ago

http://tinyurl.com/3bkael

http://tinyurl.com/3xhmbq

http://mashable.com/2008/03…

http://tinyurl.com/38yh6c

http://tinyurl.com/2qmy3p

http://tinyurl.com/2zsd3f

http://tinyurl.com/2l9sns

http://tinyurl.com/3du44p

http://snurl.com/22gpo

apenny: Tyler Perry (20 Mill movie this weekend) is such a fabulous rags to riches tale.

http://www.google.com/searc…

http://tinyurl.com/3384fe (doesn’t display on blackberry? Wtf ?)

http://tinyurl.com/3dw4tu

rycaut: I wax a bit surprised to OH people complaining about the nudity which I think says more about Americans than the filmmakers about 11 hours ago
rycaut: btw The Bank Job was quite good if not particularly surprising (not The Usual Suspects but a fun period crime caper) about 11 hours ago

Follow @garyvee @warriors @Pistachio?

–8pm last night–
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

As you can see, it’s mostly links, mixed in with notes about two films I want to see and a service I wanted to try but had yet to. I wanted to reply to some messages that I saw while making this digest, when that happened I switched to TwitterBerry (so as not to lose my place) and posted the reply. Then it’s simply an action of visiting these sites in order until something else needs to be done – if I get a chance to do something more productive, I email the unfinished list to myself for checking when I get back to my machine.

Creating this digest takes me 10-20 minutes depending on volume and interestingness of my friends, and it’s easy to make sure I see everything interesting tweeted over a period of time. Also, in case you’re wondering, the above digest represents 13 hours of activity.

I got some good advice in one of my lectures today from the co-founder of my film school (Stephen Kopels gets the nod on this clever colloquilism). The worst thing you can do is preface a presentation with an apology. That works with everything in life. The key is to do your best and then present it confidently as being your best. If your presenting something (be it powerpoint, painting, film, code, project, or absolutely anything) do you want the audience to walk in with a negative mood or a positive mood? The example Stephen used was cooking someone dinner. If you goto someone’s house for dinner and the cook starts the meal with apologizing for overcooking the chicken, you are going to look for flaws in the food instead of enjoy the dinner. So don’t apologize for your chicken, whatever your chicken may be.