Market research results
First of all, if you are one of the people who took time out of their day to take my recent suvery, Thank You! I had a good response, with 55 responses currently. I was hoping to get at least 50 responses, and promoted the survey through all my social networks. I truly appreciate your time and I think the results reflect the diversity of those that provided feedback.
So with this post, I’d like to briefly recap the survey results and share my observations of how I interpret them and how they may or may not have changed my thinking on my first entrepreneurial outing.
Demographics
Everyone taking the survey indicated they were a “business professional”. This was more of a check question – I really didn’t anticipate any skateboarders or surfer dudes coming across the survey, but you never know. As far as the age distribution it was a good sampling with the most popular age group responding being 41-50 at 38%.
Overall, I was very happy with the range of people responding.
Social Networks
As expected given who was taking the survey, the top social networks used were LinkedIn (43%), Facebook (27%) and twitter (20%). I did have 5 responses (4%) of “Other”. Turns out there are some business professionals out there using Ning!
As to what everyone uses their social networks for, this was another verification of my assumptions in that status updates (33%), responding to friend’s posts (32%) and sharing information or links (28%) represented the majority of activity.
Platforms
As expected again, Blackberry (34%) was the second highest response on brand of smartphone. Palm came in as 13% and iPhone at 14%. Surprisingly, the highest response was “Other” at 36%! What did I forget? A couple windows mobile responses and a lot of Motorola Q responses. Yes, I know – same thing. So that’s a good chunk of responses for the Windows Mobile platform.
Value and Pricing
Here’s where it got really interesting.
First, an overwhelming 71% said they would see value in a smartphone app that would let them interact directly with their social networks. Where it got interesting was on price. Whereas 38% said they wouldn’t pay anything for the app, the next highest response was up to $10 with 25% of the responses. It was then $3 with 14%, $5 with 12% and $1 with 9%.
So it appears for those willing to pay for the app, they see enough value that they are willing to pay what would be a huge price on the iPhone app store. While this did catch me a bit by surprise, it nevertheless makes perfect sense in a way. I have nothing to rely on here other than outright stereotypes, those of iPhone users versus other smartphone users. I am NOT saying anyone that uses an iPhone is not a business person. But I think Apple has done a good job of positioning the value of their product line in the hardware not the app. So it’s been my observation that by and large, iPhone users generally expect an iPhone app to be free or minimally priced.
Other smartphone users, not use to buying apps and approaching the survey question from a cost/benefit analysis I believe, answered based on the value they perceived in the app. Regardless of whether any of these blatantly over-generalized statements are true or not, what I take away from these responses is that if I can deliver a social network app with high perceived value, I have plenty of latitude on pricing and users who will be willing to pay it.
My Next Step
Whereas this survey has convinced me there is a market for my idea and I am committed to moving forward more than ever now, it also drove home that the app needs to have significant value to be adopted. The non-iPhone community may be willing to pay more for an app, but expectations seems to be pretty high as well. So as opposed to moving directly into development, I am reaching out to several casual and advanced social network users to get input on what they would like to see in such an app and change my initial design accordingly. If you would like to contribute to that process, please feel free to contact me and we can arrange something.
Finally, I’d like to thank all the people who wished me luck via the free-form responses. I have some great friends and business associates and I look forward to sending you all a free advance copy of the application when it’s available.
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