Need your help fellow growth hackers... If you could only ask 1 specific question to a successful entrepreneur, WHAT QUESTIONS WOULD YOU ASK?
* (think everyday folks who exit their startup at the $500k - 10M level, not famous, big-money types like Elon Musk)
Either reply with your answer or post it here in the FB Group.

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Imagine you want to enter a super crowded online-survey market with a new product.
You must be either crazy or know this smart approach that helped the guys from Fieldboom successfully do exactly this without millions in investment.
Moreover, they managed to get their first paying customers before having a product.

Here's how they managed to achieve this:

1. Before having a product, they wanted to figure out what their current competitors are missing.
2. They created a simple Facebook ad.
3. They targeted only the followers of their biggest competitor, SurveyMonkey.
4. The ad asked a simple question "Frustrated with SurveyMonkey? Take a few minutes to tell us why and we'll give you free lifetime access to Fieldboom when it launches."

5. The ad led to a simple online survey with these questions:
+ Are you a current SurveyMonkey customer?
+ What do you like the most about SurveyMonkey?
+ What do you like the least about SurveyMonkey?
+ Which one thing would you change about it if you had a magic wand?
+ Your first name and email address?
+ Would you be available to talk further with us on the phone?

6. This way they collected almost 300 responses in a few weeks.
7. The responses showed them what their product should be: simple, features that automate a lot of the manual work, user experience, not confusing pricing.

8. They spoke to 28 of those people. To end each of these discovery phone calls, they asked one critical question:
Would you be willing to pre-pay $200 for lifetime access to Fieldboom?
Of the 28 people, 8 said yes. And they all paid within a day of the call.

9. Then they scaled this approach to get their first 100 paying customers before the launch of their product.

The key lesson:
Hearing “Yes, I’d use your product” means nothing.
“Shut up and take my money” is the ultimate form of validation of product/market fit.


Cheers,
Charlie Patel ;)



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