Web entrepreneurs: you have no idea what your customers are thinking...

In late 2009, my best friend Jennifer and I decided to start an internet company building affiliate-based shopping sites.  I had recently read about the Lean Startup philosophy, coined by two entrepreneurs Eric Ries and Steve Blank.

 At its core, the Lean Startup model makes building a business analogous to playing poker.  You play the blinds (build very little of your business), learn a bit, bet if things still look good, learn some more, bet, learn, and eventually go all in or fold and try your luck at the next hand.  Jennifer and I decided to use this “bet-learn-iterate” approach in our business, and although we were developers, we also decided that if there were a third party tool that could help us learn more quickly, we would use it, even if we thought those tools looked/performed worse than what we could code ourselves.

We mostly use third party tools for two purposes: 1) Learn what customers are doing on our site(s) and 2) Learn what customers wish they could do on our site.  Here are some of our favorites:

1) Learn what customers are doing on your site


Magazine style?
For Shiny Orb, our social shopping site for wedding apparel, we wanted to test whether brides would want to peruse dresses in an e-commerce-like layout or in a magazine-like  layout.  Our site already had the former style, but we surmised brides would prefer the latter.  Fully building out a magazine style would have cost us weeks.  

So instead, in one day, we designed a couple of static pages in the magazine style and had a “next” button allowing people to flip the page to the next static page.  We used Google Analytics to track if people were drawn to that style and clicked the next button.  As it turned out, very few people clicked, so we scrapped that idea altogether.

Google Analytics is both powerful and tricky to learn.  Easier tools such as Clicktale and Userfly, which both automatically record each individual user’s browsing session, would also have allowed us to achieve the same result.  We’ve used both tools in other experiments.  

2) Learn what customers *want* to do on your site


Wedding dresses?  Teal?  Fish?
It’s equally important to learn what users expect to do on your site.  After Shiny Orb launched, we wanted to learn if our customers were truly trying to find bridesmaid dresses, our sole offering at the time.  We decided to cut and paste the Google Custom Search widget, a text-based search field, into our site.  When connected with Google Analytics, we could see what searches people were doing.  

As a quick glimpse into our search results: “teal”, “Mon Cheri” (a brand), “wedding dresses”, and the occasional random word such as “fish”.  From this (and many more search terms), we learned that people were looking for wedding apparel we didn’t have and many were also trying to search for dresses by color.  Building off this experiment, we added a color-based search filter and additional wedding apparel.  

In other experiments, we’ve used Google Forms and KISSinsights to survey people and ask them questions regarding what they wish we were able to help them with.

I hope these tools, none of which require programming, help you get started in minimizing the gap between customer expectations and a customer’s actual experience.  

Elizabeth Yin is a co-founder at LaunchBit, a resource to help aspiring web entrepreneurs launch their web businesses without coding.  Learn more about getting your company off the ground with LaunchBit online classroom, which starts January 24th.

 

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