@andrewchen

I am often pitched with new blog widgets and services to try out. Most of the time, I won’t try it, unless it falls into one of two categories:

1. It helps me build my readership and audience, particularly email and RSS subscribers or Twitter followers
2. Or, it helps me understand my audience, and even better, creates a way for me to start a dialog with them

The best tools do both. If you have one like that, then send me a note at voodoo at gmail. I am likely to try it out!

Money doesn’t matter
Note that monetization doesn’t factor into my decision above – and that’s because I didn’t start this blog to make money Instead, I am writing it because I enjoy the process, it helps me structure my thoughts, and I often meet interesting people through my blog.

When I’m thinking about a problem and am willing to make it public, a quick post or two about the topic often brings world class people to the forefront, and it’s a lot easier to learn from people who are much smarter than me than to try to figure things out from first principles in a vacuum. 

Plus, making money from writing a niche blog is hard, with the only viable method being direct monetization via ebooks or something similar. You definitely need scale to make advertising work.

For the above reason, over time, I’ve come to trust on a number of tools that I can’t live without:

1) Feedburner, for email subscriptions
There are certainly better email feed managers, but I built my initial audience with this, and it’s working well enough. Every time someone subscribes by email, they enter in their address. This becomes a valuable clue and I often will google email addresses or look them up on Linkedin, just to know. And sometimes, it becomes a trigger for me to send an email and introduce myself. That’s pretty good. The biggest plus would be if there was a way to

2) Twitter, for follower bios
Twitter has a similar affect, except people are much more likely to follow on Twitter than give you their email address. Similarly, Twitter has a nice “bio” that you can eyeball for details about the person. I’ve also recently discovered Tweepsearch, which lets me do things like search for any of my followers who do iPhone work and contact them. The point is, it makes it so that blogging becomes a great tool for me to massively (but passively) build a big business network – and the corners of this network may not be helpful today, but maybe one day

3) LinkedIn, for business backgrounds
LinkedIn has some of the same properties as above, but also has detailed info. On the other hand, it absolutely skews towards marketing and business professionals. I often find that a lot of engineers don’t have Linkedin accounts.

And by the way, Google Friend Connect sucks
I recently tried out Google Friend Connect, and it definitely sucks using the values above. If you go to my blog now, at the bottom there’s a “Social Bar” where you can “join” this blog (whatever that means). Since implementing it last night, I’ve had a couple people join, but it’s basically worthless. There’s really no profile to speak of, and there’s no way for me to reach out to interesting people, even if I could figure out whether they were interesting or not. What’s the point of having people join then, if I can’t do anything with the audience I build?

Disqus has a little bit of this also – people often comment on stuff, and sometimes their comments will be really interesting. But when I go to a Disqus profile, there’s often little to know information, and certainly no way to contact them. Instead, I just have to reply in the public comments, which is pretty kludgey and certainly not a “passive” way to go about doing this.

Stop focusing on monetization, at least for 99% of bloggers!
My uber point on this, ultimately, is that 99% of bloggers don’t make any money from their blogs, and the rewards for their work are meeting interesting people as well as building up a following. Things that help pierce the veil of anonymity (with reader consent, of course) are the most useful since it helps on all the non-monetization goals.

Anyway, if you have a useful widget or plugin for me to try that fulfills any of the above, please shoot me an email.

Hi everyone,

Hopefully all of you are enjoying the blog although I’ve only been writing about once a week now. We recently passed 7,000 subscribers, which is fantastic. The blog continues to grow and seems to be a useful reference for people.

Anyway, as some of you know, I’ve been working on some of my own startup projects – still quite early – and am now looking for recommendations for smart engineers.

In particular, I’m looking for advice on:

• Engineers that are interested in consumer internet startups
• Have experience with Ruby (or PHP/Python) including frameworks like Rails or Django
• Can work with me on customer-centered product development
• Have a BS/MS in Computer Science or equivalent experience

If you have recommendations for interesting people for me to talk to, please shoot me a note at voodoo [at] gmail.

I’d hugely appreciate it!

Thanks,
Andrew

Answer this question honestly…
When’s the last time you spoke to your target customer? Like really talked to them?

If it’s been more than a month, then shame on you!

Consumer internet companies are often overly dependent on quantitative data like Google Analytics, but without understanding the qualitative parts – the consumer psychology that actually goes into making purchase decisions. It’s a good idea to balance out the data aspects, particularly if you are not your target customer.

If you haven’t finished developing your product yet, that’s no excuse! After all, there are many methods of doing qualitative user research without writing a single line of code. In fact, in many ways talking to your customer and understanding them great detail is often much more powerful before you even go through the product development process.

How to recruit target customers to talk to, in 5 easy steps
It’s very very easy to talk to people on the internet. You really don’t have to do much work. Here’s what I will often do, in order to get some opinions about a particular set of products, or to deeply understand user behavior (like gifting! or decorating), or to get a better picture of what people do day to day.

Step 1: Write a recruiting survey
First off, go to Wufoo.com or a similar site (Surveymonkey.com works well too).

The most important part is to title the survey “Get a $20 Amazon gift certificate for 1 hour on the phone” or something similar.

Make a survey that includes the following questions:

• First name (text)
• Phone number (phone number)
• Email so we can send you a gift certificate (text)
• Best time to call, morning, afternoon, evening, weekend (multiple choice)
• Tell me about yourself! (textarea)

That is usually a good base, and you should make all the entries required. Then you also want to provide a couple questions that can help you screen or otherwise prioritize your questions. For example, for a Facebook app you might ask:

• What types of games do you like (multiple choice) 
• What kind of phone do you have? (multiple choice)
• Why do you like game X? (textarea)
• Have you ever spent money on a game? (multiple choice)
• etc.

Anyway, you get the point. I usually try to keep these pretty short.

Step 2: Recruit your participants
Now that you have a survey set up, then you can take the URL and start getting people to fill it out. There are a couple obvious areas to recruit people, and I typically do the following:

• Link the survey from your product (if it’s out there)
• Buy ads on Facebook and send traffic to your link
• Post your survey on Craigslist
• Buy ads on Google Adwords and send clicks to your survey

For the ad-based solutions, I will usually limit the buy to $50 per day, and spend $0.50 or so per click. I usually find that it costs about $1-2 per survey completion. After I recruit a couple dozen, then you can start moving forward with the call.

Step 3: Do your phone interviews and learn something!
This where you’ll learn the most – you can just pick up the phone and start talking. I usually structure the interviews into a couple distinct sections, depending on what I’m trying to learn.

The first section I usually try to learn about basic internet usage:

• Tell me about yourself
• What’s your typical day like?
• Tell me about your computer setup – what do you have? When do you use it?
• What are your favorite internet sites? What sites do you use every day?

Then depending on the topic, I’ll usually drill into 3 or 4 different areas with a couple questions each. The entire point is to ask open-ended questions without leading them too much. I will do as many of these calls as makes sense until I am hearing the same information over and over. Then I’ll start tweaking things and changing the interview to adjust.

Also, I will usually not show them a product unless the entire discussion is focused on that – the point of these conversations for me is usually qualitative understanding, not usability. Having them thoroughly test competitive products can be interesting also. You want to use this information to drive product strategy, and not be reactive.

I guarantee you’ll learn something!

Step 4: Buy your interviewees a gift card
When you’re done, don’t forget to send your interviewees a gift certificate – $20 card from Amazon is a good idea – to thank them for their time.

One of the best things is that once you get some relationships going with the best interviewees, you can go back to them for updates or to identify some of the most extreme cases.

Conclusion
The point is, it’s easy to talk to people, and it’s this type of detective work that separates customer-focused companies from technology-driven ones. There’s even a fun tool to suggest a bunch of other methodologies like this also – the IDEO method card deck.

If you have other additions to this, please suggest in the comments!

Want more?
If you liked this post, please subscribe or follow me on Twitter. You can also find more essays here.