Your waitlist, onboarding, and free trial are perfect for doing user research

Sales and marketing teams are great at doing user research with future customers. Sales teams use online forms to see if there's a good fit while marketers use demographics and feedback to create better messaging.

What about startups without sales or marketing teams?

As a startup, aim to take every opportunity to get to know your future customers. At Viable, we use our onboarding surveys and free trial form to learn more about our prospective customers.

What questions should you include?

Besides requesting contact information so you can get back to them, find out who they are, the size of their business, what tools they use (if applicable), and what problems they’re trying to solve.

Demographics

Understand who your potential user is both at the individual and company level. Ask questions such as:

• What’s your role?
• What company do you work for?
• What category or industry does your company operate in?

Size of the business

Knowing the size of your prospective customer’s company will help you create segments that align to your offerings, or develop new ones. You can ask questions such as:

• How many employees do you have?
• How many users do you serve?
• How many x actions will be performing per day/week/month? E.g. how many emails will you send a month (for an email service provider service).
• How much data do you have/process/analyze? E.g. how many terabytes of data do you analyze per week?

Pain points

Ask potential new customers what problem they’re trying to solve.  Ideally you provide them space to explain in their own words what they need. You can also provide multiple choice answer options, depending on how clear-cut your product’s use case is.

You can ask prospective customers what tools they use today, either to solve their problem or in ways adjacent to your product or service. For instance, if your product has integrations with multiple productivity apps, you’ll want to know which apps prospects are already using.

Bonus questions for insights into your outreach efforts

Tracking activity across the internet is far from perfect. You can ask people how they heard about your product. Matching their responses to your marketing efforts will be inexact—especially if your startup’s marketing stack is still sparse—but it’ll help give you a sense of which channels are working.

Where should you ask these questions?

As you develop your marketing and user research capabilities, start with the intake forms you’re already using, such as:

• Demo requests
• Waitlist sign ups
• Onboarding sessions

Any time you have a chance to speak with a potential new customer is a good time to learn about who they are and what pain point they’re experiencing. You’ll be better equipped with the qualitative data to validate product improvements or new product ideas.

Get customer insights immediately so you can inform product decisions faster

Bring together user research from across different apps and structure them for analysis without cumbersome data engineering projects. Let Viable's powerful AI do the heavy lifting for you.

Why not see if we can help you get useful insights while saving you hours of work? Spend more time making data-driven decisions that improve your product and customer experience.

Try us for 30 days

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