Learn from your customers. Share with your team.
Customer research can be roughly divided into two steps. First, you learn something new or further validate your current knowledge. Second, you share that knowledge with the people you work with.
You’d think the sharing part would be the easier half of the equation but from my own experience, this isn’t the case. This is mostly because of what happens after the something is shared. Knowledge just tends to disappear.
It’s never been easier to get feedback from your customers but making that feedback useful, enduring and actionable in your organization is hard. How do you cut through the noise, synthesize all your feedback and make it easy to digest?
It has been fun to chat with some people in my network about this, trying to learn: Is this a real problem? And how are customer research people trying to solve it?
It seems like there are some products out there trying to address this challenge, while other folks are building their own research libraries and databases.
It got me wondering whether there might be a small side project in this. 😄
I started working at Buffer as a customer researcher but about a year ago I moved into a product marketing role. Customer research is a component of what I do but I spend more time thinking about how to create and pitch ideas.
I think the best way to learn is to do, so I thought I’d set up a little challenge for myself.
Come up with a product idea and see if you can successfully position it to create demand.
Here’s the product idea and positioning I came up with. I’m calling the product Lernflo.
For customer experience professionals who want to synthesize and share research throughout their organization, Lernflo is a simple database that helps people on your team make customer-driven decisions, unlike other research libraries and tools, Lernflo makes it easy to share customer insights.
(If you’re curious, I’m using a positioning template that my marketing director recently shared with our team.)
I also thought it would be fun to set up a landing page to test the idea and the positioning. Here’s what I did:
- Set up a landing page using my free Mailchimp account
- Created a quick “logo” using Sketch
- Grabbed a background image from Unsplash
- Downloaded a free icon set (I wish could remember where from! I found it on Reddit)
- Added a signup form with an autoresponder email
I absolutely love Mailchimp for email marketing but had never used it for landing pages, so I was excited to give it a try. The page editor didn’t seem nearly as flexible or powerful as Unbounce but it was really quick to set up — and free. My goal was to create the page and quickly and as cheaply as possible, so it fit the bill.
Does the idea behind Lernflo resonate with you? I’d be so interested to hear what you think. Feel free to sign up to mailing list on the page, I’ll be keeping anyone on that list posted with how this side project progresses.
