Survey says...

In reading “Disciplined Entrepreneurship” by Don Sull, I especially took note of his comments on experiments and experiment creep, as Mark and I are currently trying to strategically prioritize how we will test our assumptions.  Sull defines an experiment in the entrepreneurship context as a "test designed to reduce sources of uncertainty critical to the success of a new venture before deciding to commit additional resouces” and lists examples such as undertaking customer research, building prototypes, and working with beta customers.  He cautions that experiment creep can, for lack of a better phrase, creep in "when the people running the experiment become vested in its success, lose objectivity and cast their results in the most favorable terms possible."  

As one of our experiments, a mentor recently suggested that we send out a survey to a targeted group of students in order to assess what skills they think they may be able to offer employers.   We will use this free survey tool to test the critical assumptions that students in the Heinz school have skills that are attractive to employers for use on discrete projects and that these students would be interested in working on these projects.  Obviously, we want this survey to produce useful data for us so I did a little research on how start-ups might design a survey to get actionable insights. 

Brent Chudoba, the General Manager of the SurveyMonkey Audience Business, suggests determining the primary business questions where feedback from a large audience would help make better business decisions.  He offers the following tips:

• ·      Do this by thinking backward of what you will do with the data once you have it. 
• ·      Keep goals narrow because you can always run more projects. 
• ·      Come up with key objectives. 
• ·      Determine who your target audience is in terms of size, gender, etc.  
• ·      Turn the objectives into actionable questions. 
• ·      Now, act on the data you have collected! 

The following is a great breakdown of how to effectively apply Brent's tips for effective surveying: http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/surveys/ .   Perhaps after we have conducted this survey, we will apply Sull's suggestion for preventing experiment creep - asking a third party to give feedback on the results.

What other cost-effective means have you used to test assumptions for your venture?  How have you prevented experiment creep?