No. 5: Guinea pigs wanted 🐹 (for fun and adventure 🎡!)

Hi friends,

I’m eschewing (eschewing!) my regular “here’s all the things I’ve made this week” format in order to ponder something.

I’ve been thinking a lot about customer research lately. In my dream world at &yet, we talk to customers all the time. We share conversations and insight across the team. Every iteration of every project is based on new learnings that come out of deep collaboration with our customers.

In the real world, while we handle customer research for our clients like champions, we struggle with doing this for ourselves. We’re a small team, so every customer conversation takes quite a percentage of our available time. We’re lucky to work really closely with our clients, so we get a deep understanding of their businesses in the process. But when it comes to developing our own new products and services, it’s tough to get a feel for what our broader community is dealing with, and how we can help.

I’m committed to getting better at this. So I sat down today and was going to create a survey. I was going to call it the Weirdos Survey Extravaganza (the “Extravaganza” part was that we’d send you a weirdos sticker pack as thanks for your participation, based on the amazing illustrations from our Find Your Weirdos project).

But what I realized is that crafting really good survey questions is hard. I need some test subjects.

Maybe you could be my guinea pig?

For this next research project, I need to talk to a specific set of people:

• Are you a founder or CEO who leads a team (small or large) —OR— are you responsible for some aspect of growth in your organization?
• Are you experiencing growth challenges? (Either because you’ve got big goals you need to reach, or because something you’re doing just isn’t working?)

If yes, and if you’re willing to be vulnerable with me (I know these are big IFs, and I swear myself to utter confidentiality), I have a proposal for you.

1. I’d like to ask you some questions about your business and your role. They might be hard questions to answer honestly. But it also might feel good to talk. I’m a good listener.
2. In exchange, if you’ve got challenges that I have expertise in (and if you’re open to it), I’m happy to share my perspective, based on 15 years of being in the thick of these kinds of things.
3. I’ll also send you stickers.

The goal is for me to end up with a better understanding of the questions I need to ask (and to decide if a survey is really the right way to ask them), and for you to end up with some business catharsis, some outside perspective, and some amazing stickers.

Thanks in advance (and also feel free to share this with a friend if you think they might be a good person for me to talk to).

— Sarah Avenir