How to crowd-test your product idea and get valuable feedback

As a product manager, getting feedback on your product throughout the product's life cycle is crucial to carefully analyze things, make informed decisions, and determine if your product is successful in the market or not. 

This proves to be very helpful during the development stages for building and deploying your SaaS product and establishing a foolproof strategy. This is critical, in order not to create bland products for the market that fail to possess any identity. 

Apart from assisting you in your product and development strategy, the customer feedback will also save your skin in the following ways- 

1. Understand your customers better 
2. Increase the customer satisfaction 
3. Improve products and services 
4. Boost loyalty
5. Help in making informed decisions 

As an entrepreneur, gathering customer feedback can be hard! But is one of the most important chores that you need to carry out as a product developer. Coming up with strategic methods of customer feedback can help you collect data from your target audience and turn those customer insights into actionable items. 

Early-stage customer feedback is essential as it helps in understanding the market and target audience better, which in turn helps to create the right product for the right people!

So, let's talk about various ways to get your customer’s feedback. 

1. Prominently show the feedback button in the product

One of the best ways to get feedback is to make it simple for users to give feedback. Do this by ensuring to offer plenty of opportunities for users to get in touch with you and your team. The feedback button should be positioned in a way, that it’s easy to find and is not too intrusive. 

Feedback buttons are usually attached on the side, bottom, or the top of the website and when the button is clicked, a feedback form pop-up overlays the screen. This is by far one of the most effective ways to collect customer feedback. 

Remember it’s vital to get feedback from customers whenever possible even if you think the product is at its best, chances are that there might be a user who sees a problem. 

2. Establish a private beta group 

As the product goes into production, it's essential to bring in live feedback and incorporate that into your SaaS product development processes. One of the easiest ways to do this is to set up a private beta group where product fans, investors, and users can test the alpha version of your product. 

You can leverage your email lists to do that, or look for different ways to set up a beta test group online using big players like betali.st or Erli Bird.

Beta testers are extremely useful in getting honest, unbiased feedback from people using and testing your product as it is being developed. Here you get access to two types of data. 

a) Qualitative data

Qualitative data can be collected through various qualitative data tools like heatmaps and eye-tracking. These are easier than full-blown, official usability tests using proper scenario-based scripts and rigorous methodology. 

b) Quantitative Data

It can be collected via various quantitative analysis tools like Google Analytics or informal testing sessions where you can observe the usage of your product by users.

This is the most effective and efficient way to collect feedback for products at an early stage.

3. Prompt people to give feedback at the end of the demos 

If you are currently at an early stage of product development, consider offering a free demo with a trial period. This is another excellent way to build rapport with your audience and potential customers. 

After the demo, as your customers are familiar with your product, and you can reach out to them via email to know their suggestions and any comments. You can further use this information along with the product development team to know the customer's opinion. 

This is where Zeda.io can come into the picture. It allows for careful documentation of feedback throughout your project development process. Zeda.io includes user flow analysis, wireframes, and customer profiling, just to name a few.

4. Net Promoter Score 

Another way you can improve your product is by utilizing Net Promoter Score (NPS). NPS is a customer loyalty index used to gauge the success of your product. Moreover, it also helps in getting some insight into the opinions of your customers regarding the various stages of your product.

To grow product acceptance, you need satisfied customers so that you can spread information about your product. What really counts though is how these people feel about your product because if they love it, they'll tell other people and send referrals your way. 

To get there, giving free demos of your product to your potential customers is recommended. And don't forget to ask them to share their insights or suggestions. 

Customer feedback is a crucial component to creating a successful product. It's almost impossible to develop an effective product without hearing your voice. But it isn't always easy to get feedback from customers at the beginning stages of a product. 

At the outset, you may have to take a more personal tone depending on the situation, but be prepared to adapt that approach as you gain more and more users–this will help you find actionable insight in your data and further refine your product accordingly.