Attending the Founder Institute is great for the brain: every session contains nuggets of wisdom and tricks that we can all apply to our current projects.
This week, the topic was market research.
The discussion included a two-box metric to find out if you have a real market or a niche. At some point, a member of the audience contributed this trick: he used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, to perform research, quickly and cheaply.
It’s indeed a great way to capture and measure feedback from thousands of regular users. It complements nicely another tactic, which is to setup Google Ad campaigns for potential products, which is quite smart too.
The only downside of Mechanical Turk is that the demographics is not highly sophisticated. What do you expect from someone who will work for cents? But you can compensate by the sheer amount of data you can extract from those studies.
That’s real market research. Better than what most people go through when they start a project.
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