Getting people to give feedback on your idea or product can be daunting.

Look no further than the free classifieds. You can use Craig’s List for free customer research.

  1. Post an ad on Craig’s List asking for help to solve your issue*
  2. Funnel respondents into a survey – Use Google Form‘s as a free option.
  3. Gather and anlyze your responses. Tweak and repeat if necessary.

*In a decent sized city you’ll typically get 200 or so responses.

Using Craig’s List for free customer research was just one of the suggestions from the Google Entrepreneur Hang Out about “Lean Design Meets Design Thinking”.

Watch the discussion here:

Your customers can rarely  tell you what they want until they taste it i.e. they don’t really know what they want.

The Spaghetti Sauce story:

Another good read on the topic of researching ideas quickly and with minimum resource can found from @techrepublic on Can User Experience Designers Be Lean?