1.
MIT Entrepreneurship and
Maker Skills Integrator
Primary Market Research:
Techniques workshop
January 9, 2017
Elaine Chen

2.
What we will cover in this session
• Detailed interviews
• Card sorting
• Digital experimentation
• On line surveys
2

3.
A few tenets
4

4.
versus
Qualitative Quantitative
Primary Market Research:
A Bird’s Eye View

5.
Some go-to PMR techniques
9
Detailed Interviews Observation Immersion
Landing page experimentsCard sorting exercise Facebook ad experiments

6.
What we will practice today
10
Detailed Interviews Observation Immersion
Landing page experimentsCard sorting exercise Facebook ad experiments

7.
Workshop 1: Detailed Interviews
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8.
Demonstration
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9.
Technique cheat sheet
• Establish rapport before you begin
• Be 100% present. Don’t multitask.
• Listen and observe. Pay attention to body language.
• Don’t follow a script line by line. Let the subject lead.
• Ask short, open ended questions – and practice active listening.
• ”Tell me about the last time…”
• “Tell me about how you…”
• ”You said XXX. Tell me more?”
• “Why?” | “Why not?”
• … 13

10.
TALK LESS
Listen more

11.
Simulation: Pretend this is your idea.
15
You get sleepy during the day and that is a problem.
You thought of a product that can wake you up, in the
form of a good tasting candy!
Your goal: See if other people get sleepy too. If so:
Understand where, when, how they get sleepy.
Understand what happens if they get sleepy. Ask
what they do now about that.
DON’T TRY TO SELL THE PRODUCT!

12.
Simulation: Pretend this is your idea.
16
You get sleepy during the day and that is a problem.
You thought of a product that can wake you up, in the
form of a good tasting candy!
Your goal: See if other people get sleepy too. If so:
Understand where, when, how they get sleepy.
Understand what happens if they get sleepy. Ask
what they do now about that.
DON’T TRY TO SELL THE PRODUCT!
Phrases to use
– “Tell me about the
last time you…”
– “Tell me about how
you…”
– “You said xxx. Tell
me more?”
– “Why?”
– “Why not?”

13.
Sharing!
17

14.
Why detailed interviews are a great 1st step
• Best, cheapest, fastest, and most information-dense first step
in the discovery process
• When you don’t know what you don’t know, open-ended
conversations are best
• Face-to-face conversations helps you get to know your
customer as a person, not as a statistic
• Learnings will vastly improve your effectiveness in
subsequent rounds of research (qualitative or quantitative)
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15.
Workshop 2: Card sorting

16.
Our persona: Brian
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17.
The design challenge
• We are going to design a product that solves the
problem Brian claims he has
• Working in groups, take 5 minutes to brainstorm
features you think he will care about – and write each
feature on an index card
• Pro tip: Keep the features small and separate!
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18.
Simulation: Open Card Sort & Prioritization
• We are first going to do an
“Open card sorting”
exercise to see how Brian
categorizes the features
• Then we are going to ask
Brian to help us prioritize
the feature set
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19.
Why card sorting works
• Fast and easy to do
• You can get data out of anyone – even non-talkers
• Eliminates the risk for leading questions / confirmation
bias
• Helps you group features into logical groupings in the
words of the customer
• Fast way to quickly get a handle on prioritization
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20.
Workshop 3: Digital experimentation

21.
A typical digital experiment
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Design landing
page(s) with a call
to action
State the
hypothesis
Design an
experiment
Send out landing
page to suspects
Wait for results to
come in
Analyze sales
funnel metrics
Persevere or pivot?

22.
About that landing page…
26
Design landing
page(s) with a call
to action
State the
hypothesis
Design an
experiment
Send out landing
page to suspects
Wait for results to
come in
Analyze sales
funnel metrics
Persevere or pivot?

23.
Things you can test with landing pages
• Product interest
• Purchase intent
• Product positioning
• Product concept messaging
• Visual design
• ... etc
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24.
The story of Accumark 3D
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25.
4h to find out if there is interest
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Opens Email
Clicks thru to
page
Clicks “Sign
up”
Provide
s email
30%
It’s a GO!

26.
Example landing page – cheap “currency”
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27.
Example landing page - real ”currency”
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28.
Experimental platform: http://unbounce.com
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29.
In class exercise
• Goal: Design an experiment to gauge interest in a
new offering at the HK Node – a speaker series for
hardware entrepreneurs at the Hong Kong node
• Exercise:
• Pick a target persona and explain how you will reach
them
• Design the experiment including success criteria
• Sketch the landing page
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30.
Sharing!
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31.
Pro tips
• Treat the landing page like an ad! It is a
marketing creative exercise.
• Collect “currency” in the call to action
• Email is meaningful
• Credit card is even more meaningful
• Pre-payment is the most meaningful
• Graph and interpret funnel metrics
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32.
On line surveys

33.
A quick word on surveys
• Qualitative before quantitative… always
• But some things require anonymity and sample size (pricing; P/M
fit; NPS etc)
• Technique matters
• KEEP IT SHORT
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Source: Survey monkey

34.
Playing with fire… (Thanks for being nice)
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35.
Step by step guide to startup PMR

36.
PMR, Procter and Gamble style
• Expensive (hundreds of thousands of $ and up)
• Long (3-9 months)
• Often done in conjunction with an agency
=> High quality insights at a high price
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37.
PMR, startup style
• Cheap
• Fast
• DIY. NOT rocket science. You can do it.
=> Scrappy, but helps you iterate in real time!
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38.
Step by step guide to startup PMR
• Articulate 3-5 hypotheses to be tested
• Define characteristics of research subjects
• Make a list of suspects
• For face to face: Ask for 10-15 minutes of their time
• For digital experiments: Run an email campaign and
capture funnel metrics
• Interpret results, adjust hypotheses
• Rinse and repeat
42

39.
Step by step guide to startup PMR
• Articulate 3-5 hypotheses to be tested
• Define characteristics of research subjects
• For qualitative research:
• Make a list of 30 suspects who meet criteria
• Ask for 10-15min at a time. Regroup and adjust after every 5 conversations
• Face to face if at all possible. Video Skype if not. Email / surveys don’t count.
• For digital experimentation:
• Acquire emails for suspects
• Run an email campaign
• Capture funnel metrics every step of the way
• Interpret results, adjust hypotheses
• Rinse and repeat
43

40.
What we talked about in this session
• Primary Market Research
• 6 common techniques
• 3 workshops
• Detailed interviews
• Card sorting
• Landing page tests
• Recipe for startup PMR
44

41.
References
• “3 Go-to techniques for Primary Market Research” – Elaine Chen,
Huffington Post
• “How startups can run better landing page tests” – Elaine Chen,
Xconomy
• “Talking to Humans” E-book - Giff Constable
• PMR Primer - Elaine Chen
• Templates and samples – Elaine Chen
• Survey monkey survey on drop off rate v #q’s
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42.
End
Questions?
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