
Using mTurk to interview 100 customers (in 4 hours) - craigkerstiens
http://customerdevlabs.com/2012/08/21/using-mturk-to-interview-100-customers-in-4-hours/
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evmar
Google Consumer Surveys
(<http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/home>) achieves a similar end
for a surprisingly low price, and they've figured out all the boring details
like how to poll a representative sample of the US internet population and how
to get stats right.

Disclaimer: I work on the product. I think it'd be pretty useful for startups
to gauge the market.

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justinwi
Sounds like a really interesting product, and something we'll definitely check
out, but to be very clear...interviews != surveys.

In terms of customer discovery and problem identification, absolutely nothing
beats interviews. Surveys may have their place when it comes to getting
demographic information or validating a market size, but interviews should not
be replaced with surveys.

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evmar
Wow, I somehow missed that the original article was about interviews despite
it being all over the article. I think I read it earlier in the day but only
came back later to comment on it and forgot that important part. :( Thanks for
being polite about my error.

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SoftwareMaven
This is a great option if your target is likely to be an mTurk user. Further,
this is a great write-up on _how_ to do it!

If you do this, make sure to validate your psychographics and demographics.
You will also want to validate your responses with people you've identified in
your psychographics and demographics. In other words, make sure the data you
are getting is actually valid data and not coming from some 12 year old
playing with his mom's phone. :)

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SoftwareMaven
I decided to do some digging and found some demographics[1] of mTurk users.
It's far more diverse than I thought.

1\. [http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2010/03/new-
demographi...](http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2010/03/new-demographics-
of-mechanical-turk.html)

~~~
MarkHoroszowski
Really interesting... thanks for sharing! For our surveys, we also captured
specific demographic information to get the most representative sample as
possible.

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bravura
What is a useful way to find initial customers for a B2B product? (As other
commenters have noted, mTurk is more useful in a consumer setting.)

Is there a way to find initial customers in a scalable manner? i.e. scaling it
across many different business ideas and potential customers?

This would be a great service that a lot of people would pay for. I know, I
know, I'm asking for marketing to be commoditized and turned into a service,
which is hard. I don't really know how to do it.

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trapexit
Check out Elastic: <https://elasticsales.com/what-we-do/>

(I don't work for them and haven't used them, but it sounds like they're doing
exactly the thing you're looking for.)

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bravura
Is elastic appropriate for customer development and initial marketing?

My understanding was that their use-case was if you wanted to scale out sales
on a product for which you have already identified need, price, customer
profile, etc.

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MarkHoroszowski
Really great post with 2 super relevant examples to interview and test the
theories that make up your business. I'm curious how other people are using
mTurk (and other scalable solutions) to help test their theories. Any winning
ideas out there?

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hansef
In my opinion probably a more viable approach for testing consumer-oriented
ideas (e.g. "Daycare Review Service") than B2B products (e.g "Lesson
Scheduling for Music Teachers"), but some really useful and actionable stuff
here.

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justinwi
By and large, I'd agree with you, but consider that people are still people
when they're off work. By that I mean, if the decision maker you're looking
for could easily be on Mechanical Turk in their off time. I can promise there
are Music Teachers on mTurk, just like there are marketers, hr reps, sales
people, real estate agents, etc.

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nrmehta
Really appreciate the post - especially the thought in making the content
relevant for the readers (e.g., the video).

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ovi256
I wonder how well this would work for B2B apps, in which case you need to
interview professionals of some sort.

For example, I would love to interview PR professionals. Compared to parents,
I would venture a guess that they're much harder to find on MT. I wonder if
Facebook ads would work better.

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grueful
LinkedIn and Facebook can both be pretty good when you need narrow targeting.

There are three big issues with using MTurk for business research. You can't
do much to refine who you get as respondents, the respondents are incentivized
to complete the task without regard for the effect on your data, and you have
restrictions on what you can do due to the anonymity rules.

If you're following the way of the niche, MTurk may be too problematic
compared to just slogging through some cold calls. The benefit for more
broadly targeted projects is that it lets you grab a large sample size with
fairly low effort.

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jyu
This is a pretty well known strategy. Good to see people using this still and
getting great results from it. You can get some surprisingly useful feedback
for just $X00, especially if you note down your target user group in the HIT.

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mpunaskar
Any idea how to open non-US requester account?

Right now amazon will only let you signup - if you have US billing address :(

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mmahemoff
Anyone suggest a similar tactic for people outside US, given that Google Voice
and mTurk are (mostly?) limited to US?

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justinwi
In mTurk, you can select which countries your workers are in and you could use
Skype instead of Google Voice.

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mmahemoff
For workers yes, but I don't believe you can be a mTurk provider if you're
outside the US though.

Skype would work fine here, true.

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wamatt
A great entrepreneurial hack and interesting mix of hustling,marketing and
tech.

(ps - watch the vid)

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medinismo
from the guy who got into TechStars with Nick - he is one of best hustlers I
know

