Adam Torres and Justin Chen discuss improving consumer insight.
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Show Notes:
Why should businesses be gathering consumer insight? How can businesses gather consumer insight? In this episode, Adam Torres and Justin Chen, Co-founder of PickFu, explore the PickFu story and the importance of gathering consumer insight.
About Justin Chen
Justin Chen is the co-founder of PickFu. Along with his college friend and business partner, John Li, they developed PickFu’s concept to gain consumer feedback to make a data-driven decision for the redesign of their startup’s website. This side project has evolved into an essential tool for professionals to make informed decisions to grow their businesses – smarter and faster.
While Justin and John focused on their other venture, PickFu sat on the back burner. But like all the best treasures on the internet, people discovered it. Customers used the polling platform and shared it with their friends. They found new and interesting ways to harness its power. And by listening to real people, the co-founders realized they had built something truly useful for businesses of all shapes and sizes.
About PickFu
PickFu is a versatile consumer research platform designed for effortless engagement with real individuals offering candid opinions. Within minutes, users receive comprehensive feedback on their creative concepts, enabling informed decision-making to propel business growth.
This polling platform is tailored to empower ecommerce brands, Amazon sellers, marketers, and publishers with immediate access to invaluable consumer insights. From refining product designs to optimizing packaging and testing marketing strategies, PickFu facilitates real-time feedback directly from the target audience, fostering agility and efficacy in decision-making processes.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest on the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. Today, my guest is Justin Chen, and he is the co founder over at PICFU. Justin, welcome to the show.
Hey Adam, thanks for having me. All right, Justin. So today’s topic improving success with consumer insights. Let me tell you a lot of business owners, entrepreneurs, executives listen to this, and that is a hot topic. So I know we’re in LA recording this right now and it is raining hard outside. Did they say a state of emergency?
I think last night or something. My mom called me at like 9 PM and I’m like, she never calls me that late. I was like, who died? No, everybody’s fine. She’s like, she’s like, are you floating away? You staying dry over there? Yeah. Yeah. It’s on flood watch, state of emergency, but the kids still got to go to school, luckily working at home for me.
So I’m sure you’re probably the same. Send the kids out to the wild while you’re at home. Look at that. No, I’m just, Oh man. So improving success with consumer insights. So, so how did you get obsessed with consumer insights? Where did that start for you? Yeah. So my co founder and I were building our own business, a different business years ago and it was a website.
And we were working on a redesign for it. How long ago? When you say years ago, how long ago? Oh, gosh. This was like 2008. Yeah, that’s a long time ago. It’s a long time ago. No, that’s great context, though, because it shows you’ve been at this a while. For some people, a long time ago is like, yeah, pre pandemic.
That’s not that long ago. We got a little age on this. Go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah, so we were working on a redesign. We couldn’t decide between the 2 of us. So we wanted to gather some feedback. You know, we wanted to go talk to actual strangers, maybe go to a coffee shop, but being engineers and introverts, we both didn’t want to do that.
So we, we built a solution to essentially. Be a digital focus group so that we could put up different options in front of a random audience and get unbiased feedback about which design they like and also give us written explanations why. And that was kind of the genesis of the original version of take food.
And so it kind of like stat as a side project for a number of years. And, you know, we saw entrepreneurs using it for, for different idea validation type things. And then it just started. Taking up steam on its own and we started getting all this great customer feedback of like, wow, I didn’t realize I could gather consumer research.
I thought it was just for the big companies and all this kind of stuff. And so we decided to pivot all of our attention over about 5 or 6 years ago, full time on to take flu and really start. Evolving the product and growing it. And so now we’ve got people in all kinds of industries using it together.
Any kind of insights, whether it’s a comparative or just open ended feedback on their, on their creatives and their ideas and really making a big impact on their business outcomes. How long into it were you before you decided to go full time? Oh, let’s see. Probably it’s probably sitting around for about 10 years.
Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Well, I like that. And the reason I bring that up too, by the way, is because this, you know, there’ll be people that listen to this and there’s, I always try to stress, there’s no one way to do entrepreneurship, right? Not everybody has to. Well, your story may have been otherwise. We were like, ah, we quit and we did everything.
And you know, it was crazy. I mean, that’s one way to do it. But what you just now said, that’s another way to do it. So I just like to propose different thought processes to my audience. That’s why I ask you not saying there’s a right or wrong way, but how did you know it was time to go full time? Like, what was the, what, if there was a lead up or was there a moment or.
There was kind of a moment, but I think, you know, through that entire time period of those 10 years or so, we were definitely working on it and iterating on, on the side that we were, we were trying to grow it. We were improving the product and, and I think the benefit of taking that long time period is that you, you kind of internalize a lot of insights and practices from talking to a lot of customers, trying different things, seeing what works and doesn’t work in that early stage.
Actually, a lot of our initial customers were authors testing. Book titles and book covers. And it was a very good, it was a very good industry for us to get our feet wet with kind of like industry specific marketing and kind of going after like a core smaller set of users as opposed to trying to appeal to everyone.
So that was pretty formative, I think, in our evolution of the business. But the tipping point for us was actually around 2018, 2019, we started getting mentioned. By some e commerce kind of influencers podcasts at conferences as a really insightful tool to help them make better product decisions.
And so selling on Amazon is a very popular way to, to do entrepreneurship now. And so we kind of started riding that wave of a lot of people selling on Amazon, a lot of people selling on Shopify, and we started getting inserted into a lot of different courses as a great way to validate product decisions.
And so whether that’s. Product concepts or branding or packaging design all the way down to your marketing images. So, you know, the images that show up on the Amazon search results, a lot of our customers are testing those kinds of images to make sure that they’re the most appealing image to get the click to their listing.
And so that was the big inflection point for us to. Decide that, okay, there’s a lot of legs to this and let’s really go hard at it and try to grow the business as much as possible. Let’s go further into that, by the way. Why should, whether it’s authors or if you, if you want to use that original product market fit, so to speak, that you had, or whether it’s another market you want to use as an example, like why should we be looking at consumer insight?
Yeah, it really just de risks your investment. So anything that you’re going to be putting a lot of money or time into. So, you know, for example, a book. When you publish it, and you actually publish the physical book, like, you’re not able to live test it. Things that you’re not able to live test. So, whether you’re developing products and actually creating packaging and physical products and putting it into inventory, you’re not able to live test those things.
If you’re, if you’re doing the website, sure, you can do some life testing. You can make some tweets and things like that. But as you’re doing this other kind of development. You’re risking a lot of capital and time, honestly, like it, you know, you might be selling the same product for a whole year or so.
So not having any insights is incredibly detrimental. And so. What we found actually, a lot of our customers started learning about us do the use case of improving their marketing imagery. So, like, oh, you know, why don’t I just improve my main image? I’m not getting a lot of clicks and so they’ll come to us they run short form survey, which is what we do.
So a single question and they’ll ask, like, which one would you click on? They’ll put up their main image, maybe the competitor’s main image, just to understand why they might not be getting the clicks. But invariably, the feedback they get, the written feedback that they get is about some other core aspects.
So, oh, I don’t like your branding. I don’t like your. Your packaging, your, you know, your, your product design is not as good as the competitors. And these are all very core issues that if they had gathered feedback earlier in the process, they would be avoiding this issue of unsold inventory. And so you don’t want to wait until that moment of truth or bad reviews on your product.
To discover that, oh, wow, this, brand name that I came up with in a bubble, you know, because I thought it was cool, like really doesn’t resonate with my target market. that goes for every aspect, right? That could be your branding, that could be your product, that could be your book title, your book cover, you know, any author knows that they’re, they’re always tied to whatever title they came up with.
And they probably have a very specific cover that they love, but that’s not always what’s going to resonate with their target reader. That’s amazing. And so how how can businesses gather consumer insights? How does that work? So what we’ve done is we’ve built a platform that’s kind of like very short form surveys.
So traditionally, the way that some people have done. This is the run ads. So Tim Ferris kind of popularized it with for our work. We were. he said he used the, you know, Google ads to test out some of the titles. You can definitely do that. It’s, you know, a little bit costly, a little bit hard to set up.
And, and it’s kind of done in public. So that’s not something that a lot of people like to do. Other ways that people validate things is they buy ads to landing pages or things like that. So what we’ve done is that is we, we created a very short form surveys where you ask a single question. You can put up a few different creative options that you want people to get feedback on.
And what we do is we tap into the same consumer panels that any large CPG, like a Kraft or a Procter and Gamble might use for their log form research. We tap into those same panels and we, we stitch them all together with our own layer of data quality and audience targeting on top of that, and we pay them to come and respond to these very quickly.
So we’ll ask, we’ll pose the same question that you ask us to them, and they’ll choose which book cover they like. They’ll vote on it, they’ll give written explanations, they’ll give demographic information. And all this happens really quickly, so within the matter of, you know, 15 30 minutes, you’ll get all these people giving you feedback, and you could target them as well.
So you could say, oh, I want dog owners or, you know, females who take nutritional supplements or something like that. And so you can really hone in on, on your target audience and get the relevant feedback that you need. And so, Once people discover that this is a possibility, it really opens up lot of opportunity to start gathering all kinds of feedback.
So it doesn’t even have to be things that you have creatives on. It could be as open ended as, hey, if you’ve got a dog, like, what issues. Do you have with you know, the bedding, your, your pet, your pet beds and what, what could I improve that might give you a lot of interesting product ideas. And so the way we tell people to think about it is.
It really is a digital focus group, so we’ve all seen focus groups on TV and and have our own ideas of what they are. And so if you had access to a group of your target audience, and you could talk to them, you could ask them any opening question, you could present different options to them. What would you ask?
And that’s, that’s what we’re trying to provide to people. What are some of the sizes, like of, of a focus group? Like what does that, what did numbers look like? I’m curious. Yeah. So on our, on our platform, we range anywhere from 15 to 500. I would say the most common is around 50. We find that to be like, a pretty good sweet spot of fast enough and good enough data.
I think if you’re iterating on very small changes, like, a lot of times people will iterate on font changes or small color. You could even go as low as 15 because. You know, if you, if you’re getting 12 to 3 in a certain direction, that’s that’s originally you know, strong enough. So it’s quite flexible in that depending on how large of a magnitude of a decision they’re making, you, you know, you could go higher 100, 200, 500 responses, but if you’re testing small things, you can go lower.
Yeah, I think that’s super interesting. And then do you see variations of people also doing this, like on social media and otherwise, for those that feel it’s appropriate to test some things, maybe publicly, like a book or something like that, if they feel like it is, do you see that? Yeah, definitely.
Yeah, we see a lot of people doing that. On facebook groups. There’s a lot of like community facebook groups and people testing their their ideas or their their covers We see a lot of gaming companies like, you know, indie gamers testing out characters and communities Like hey, what do you guys think about this?
Yeah, or in sub a lot of subreddits have a lot of those kind of polls, informal community polls. And so if you’re, if you’re comfortable doing that in public, that’s a great way that you mentioned the community word, like, that’s a, I feel like it, it gives you just options for engaging your community as well.
Like, I’ve kind of seen some people do it pretty well in that in that manner. And so when I see something like this, I think. Obviously, somebody doesn’t have to stop doing that, but this gives you a more formalized focus group that you know are your right target audience, right? So then it’s just kind of like a step above doing it, you know, kind of, kind of willy nilly, right?
Mm hmm. Exactly. Yeah. And I think if you already have a pretty dedicated community of fans, then I think it’s a great way to do community engagement to, to get them involved because it gets them more invested into, you know, your product decisions. And I know that that engenders more loyalty, but there is definitely always going to be some things that you don’t want to test in public.
Even if you do have that, and there’s the fatigue and assuming that your community are the ones that actually purchase from you as well, because mission matters. I mean, we do quite a bit of obviously podcast content and other content, but are those are most profitable clients. The individuals listening to the podcast and the shows.
I mean, we make advertising revenue, that kind of thing. Sure. But our, our target market is a completely different, like, Thing in terms of what we attract and what we actually market to so if we were to ask our community quote unquote You know, what do you think about this? It’s like hey vote with your dollars then buddy.
No Exactly yeah No, this is awesome Justin this is good. I mean you got you got my wheels Turning. I’m sure that a lot of the audience that are listening are envisioning and imagining what they could do if they could use PICFU and also you know, figure out what like running these tests, focus groups would be like.
That being said, first off, it’s been great having you in the show. Second, how do people follow up? I know there’s only so much we could do in a podcast up. So how, how do people follow up and learn and engage with the platform? Sure, so we are, we’re always trying to make pick through as easy to use as possible.
So you can go to pick through dot com. You could sign up for free, create a free account. And in that onboarding process, you’ll actually be able to run a free 5 responsible so that you can experience. The kind of value that you can get from actual people. And it’s one of those things where I could talk about it all day.
But until you actually try it and see people writing about your particular product and your particular idea, that’s when it’s really going to click for you. So I definitely encourage people to go try it out for free. No credit card needed to sign up. So that’s the best way to check it out. If you want to connect with me, you can find me on LinkedIn.
Amazing. That website, one more time? PICKFU. com. P I C K F U. com. Wonderful. And for everybody listening, we’ll put that in the show notes, so you can just click on the link and head right on over. And speaking to the listeners those new listeners out there, if you haven’t hit that if you haven’t hit that subscribe button I don’t know, pick it, hit that button.
We got, we got many it’s not, it’s not going to bite you. Don’t worry. It’s okay. It’s just a subscribe button. But we want you to come back and enjoy more of the amazing guests. We have on this show day in and day out. We’re working hard for you over here. Hit that subscribe button. And if you’re feeling really generous today, leave a review too.
I won’t be mad at you for that. Justin, thanks again so much for coming on the show. We appreciate all you’re doing. Thank you, Adam.
