We’ve talked for a long time about adding new products at Bespoke Row, so yesterday I started that process with a survey about custom pants. We’re conducting an experiment using our Startup Mastermind spreadsheet – if we can get 5 positive responses with less than $100 of advertising, we’ll start selling pants.
To begin with, we thought about what the most important piece of information someone can share with us is. Perhaps obviously, we realized that it’s their email address. With just that, they’ve shown that they’re a potential customer by letting us know how to contact them when we’re ready to sell.
Therefore, we decided to make our initial survey one question long. We start out on a page that tells people what we’re doing and asks for their email address. If they submit it, we add them to our custom pants mailing list on MailChimp.
Initial Survey Page - just email address
Then, we take them to a second page that has all our secondary questions – what materials/options are they looking for, whether they think the benefit will be better fit or better style, etc. None of these are required, but if the user answers them, they’d help us make a better product. The answers from these questions are collected in a Google Spreadsheet Form that gives us the ability to analyze the answers easily using Google’s tools.
Details Survey Second
I think the best part of this survey is that we randomly choose an amount of money in our potential price range and ask them “Would you be willing to pay $X for a pair of custom pants?” This is far better than the last survey I tried, when I asked this as a multiple choice question and every person naturally chose the lowest listed price.
Finally, we take the user to a thank-you page and encourage them to try a custom shirt while they’re waiting.
All together, this was pretty easy to set up (about 5 hours) and uses MailChimp and Google Docs, which are both great free tools that do their job better than we could in-house.
MPD 