Technically… we did do our research… :)
First I love press.
I want to specially thank Carrie Ghose and Columbus Business First for writing up a great story on ChumpDump and Big Kitty Labs. Rocky, Tushar and myself, we’re humbled by the attention and it helps fuel us to continue on and make ChumpDump the app we all want to be. Its one heck of a validation to get this much love 30 days from launch.
Its good to be recognized for an idea, hard work etc. But the press isn’t always gonna get ya in the best light. I mean it means well but if you didn’t express everything you needed to express, and well the story wants to be a story, some things get left out. Its all good but for the record, I want to clarify one tidbit.. we did do our research.
DOG FOOD and DOMAIN
NETNOGRAPHY
Netnography is ethnography online. Instead of watching people in person or thru a camera lens, you’re doing it online, checking out their twitter, flickr, facebook, blog, whatever and wherever you can find them.
Netnography is getting bigger and bigger everyday. More sophisticated netography is happening on the data mining side of things- where by a brand like “COKE” can data mine and monitor its presence online and tap into what people are thinking in regards to their brand with incredible ease and transparency because we’re all sharing our experiences online these days.
Makes ya a bit paranoid eh? Well fear not, you’re just one of the gazillions out there whos info is pretty much open and public. Its becoming the norm, which is why netography is taking off in a big way.
I conducted a bit of netography on the whys that would fuel ChumpDump very easily. It was easy to find data as to why something like ChumpDump should exist. I simply went to twitter and asked the question.
Using search.twitter.com and other data mining tools I searched for keywords of expression in and around my core theme, “unfollow” “why follow” “why do people follow me” etc. The results were staggering. There was never ending river of tweets in and around my core themes on the how/why/drama of following people online.
Now context is often missing, so don’t get all high thinking this is the new greatest weapon for researchers, its not. But its great for anyone who’s thinking scrappy!
Right away if you didn’t get ANY tweets regarding your inquiry, then that’d be a huge red flag in a sense that it’d make you stop and think a bit more- especially if what you were making was a consumer facing product. It may mean you need to broaden your inquiry as well.
But because we got an endless stream of chatter about our targeted keywords in question, we knew we had a good chance of fitting in with that stream of people generating those tweets. Not to mention we’d data mine that stream of tweets to find emotional targets of goodness in our own concept. A good emotion target is like honing in on a specific paint point in the chatter and making your product/service not just meet it, but exceed it.
Much of the branded attitude of ChumpDump comes from monitoring this feed of folks talking about the woes of following, unfollowing, the missing whys etc. People were noticably emotional in their tweeting. To me this meant, strike a chord vs be a bland utility.
PAST EXPERIENCE
COMPETITION
Now there was some competition to ChumpDump, but we we’re going the fun route first vs the utility route. So in that regard we had no competition, and that could of been a red flag for a savvy investor dude.
With the barriers to make so cheaper and cheaper, i think the hunt to find competition is not as useful to me than knowing the netography landscape of a concept or having intimate domain knowledge. Plus I don’t want the team to obsess around some competitive target to beat, you have your own inner demons to beat first, build your own stuff.
THE PROTOTYPE is THE RESEARCH
If you want to get a better understanding of how to run a good beta program, play some games. Game developers go to great lengths to throughly test their games before they unleash them on the masses. Getting into one of their beta programs is a good short course on how to conduct your own beta.
Plus your app sort of needs to be enabled to get the data out of people playing it better as well. One way to do that is to track everything you can in the game, button presses to time on section to time on feature etc. Collecting data on the backend of your app is HUGE. At big kitty, we have a serious data metrics capturing mantra, you will do it or else. On the front end of the experience in the app itself, make it expressive so folks can use it and share it with friends- this gives you an idea of how your app lives in the ecosystem of users beyond the clicks of game play. Lastly you need to enable the app with a way to get the feedback directly- email us your comments, or a feedback place etc.
The prototype is your first best resource to get data to help validate your effort. Its the heart of everything we do at BKL. Build it as cheap as you can and then get some real data and then move forward.
WHAT WE DIDN’T DO
10k is actually pretty cheap for a focus group. IDI’s individual interviews and what not, are even more expensive. A survey could be pretty cheap, that is if you can get anyone to do it free provided that meet your demographic requirement. There are lots of research methods, but we used the ones that resonated best for the task at hand.
We didn’t do a big research effort, not because we’re lazy or that we wanted to play the lottery on our idea but because we saw it as a tactical mistake, and mostly- a big waste of money at this stage of the game for a company that was completely bootstrapped.
Research is costly stuff. It takes time, focus and effort. I work in research everyday. At any given time, there are a dozen or more projects active at Lextant. From medical products to automotive to the future of financial systems, Lextant does it. These are firms with million dollar contracts looking to do the next right move for a product that impacts a million, often established customers. This isn’t a playground for scrappy first wave, proof of concept research.
Now that’s not to say Lextant doesn’t do research for startups, we do in fact, but its usually after a startup has acquired some funding and their making their way into scaling for bigger fish and clients and such.
At ChumpDump we did a lesser campaign of research based on eating our dog food, knowing the domain, leveraging netnography, learning from past experiences and above all else, built a vehicle to get real data sooner than later, ie the prototype.
So to clarify, ChumpDump was not a concept devoid of research data, its quite the contrary, we had ample data to back up the whys for its existence, this fueled the passion to make the game in the first place. Once we got into a beta the real goodness of real use started trickling in, and the rest is history as we evolve the concept with a living data set.
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Adam in Columbus
